Year on year, the number of DDoS attacks is increasing across the network and telecommunications industry and even beyond; however, many customers only want to pay for protection when they are already under attack.
DDoS protection can be described as something that no organisation wants to have, but it is still something they need to have.
In this regard, DDoS protection is similar to insurance cover and this article, with insight from Ciprian Abaseaca, will explore what this means, including how to be proactive rather than reactive when defending your network.
DDoS Protection and Insurance: Strategic Investments for Protection
Both DDoS protection and insurance cover are strategic investments for protection against unknown threats that can damage your business or your network.
You don’t buy them because you expect something bad to happen every day. You buy them to protect your business from unpredictable, potentially costly events.
With insurance, you’re covered financially if something goes wrong like a fire, theft, or accident. With Anti-DDoS, your digital infrastructure is protected from cyberattacks that could crash your network, disrupt services, take down your website or damage your reputation.
In both cases:
- You pay a regular fee for protection against the unknown.
- You hope you never need it, but you’re glad it’s there when trouble strikes.
- The goal is to minimize damage and downtime, ensuring your business can recover quickly and continue operating smoothly.
It’s about being proactive, not reactive and about protecting value before it’s threatened.
How to Be Proactive Against DDoS Attacks
Many organisations want to be onboarded very quickly to receive DDoS protection, sometimes even when an attack has already started. Although fast onboarding for DDoS protection is possible, protection is most effective against attacks once it has already had some time to become familiar with your regular internet traffic.
Besides setting up DDoS protection ahead of time in case of attacks which are likely to come, there are some other steps you can take to be more proactive with defense.
1. Be familiar with your normal network traffic
Every organization’s infrastructure has typical Internet traffic patterns.
You must know what your normal network traffic looks like so that you have a baseline. This means when unusual activity occurs, you can identify the symptoms of a DDoS attack.
Understanding normal activity will also help differentiate between legitimate usage and early signs of bot traffic or malicious requests aimed at disrupting service. Our previous article explores the three main types of DDoS attacks and how to mitigate them.
2. Pick a DDoS protection solution which fits your specific needs
When you are familiar with your normal network traffic, it is much easier to see what type of protection is suitable for your organisation.
One aspect that makes DDoS protection different from insurance cover is that there are tools that enable you to handle protection yourself. Depending on your needs, paying for DDoS protection from a provider might not even be necessary! In our webinar with RioRey (Session 3 of The Inter.link Edge), it is explained how BGP Flowspec can be used to mitigate DDoS attacks.
If a paid protection service is needed, it can be challenging to select a service that fits your requirements if providers do not make it clear what exactly is included in their protection.
When choosing a DDoS Protection provider, the below criteria need to be transparently outlined:
- Number of networks protected
- Number of layers protected (as explained in the OSI Model)
- Maximum attack bandwidth
- Scrubbing capacity
- Scrubbing regions
- Best Practice Filters
- Custom Templates
- Allow/Block Lists
- Pricing methodology
Pricing methodology is a hot topic in the world of DDoS Protection.
In contrast to other Anti-DDoS service offerings, Inter.link DDoS protection services are not billed on “Clean Traffic” or “Number of Attacks” – which is neither predictable nor influenceable for most customers – but on easy to determine featuresets .
When we started our DDoS Protection service, we decided to build it from a carrier perspective for other ISPs. This is why we wanted to make expectations clear. So for a certain amount of money, clients buy a certain amount of scrubbing capacity.
3. Adjust your DDoS protection solution for best effectiveness
After choosing a DDoS protection service, one thing that many organisations fail to realise is that the protection is more effective if it is adjusted based on attack data.
Using standard templates can lead to very good results but specific attack vectors might not be mitigated to the desired level. This is why attack reports are so important. They provide the key data which lets organisations know what types of attacks they face and adjust accordingly in the scrubbing centres.
For example, if you run a game server business, you have a very different expectation from when you have a traditional hosting business, or have a single static website, or when you run voice services.
DDoS protection is something that improves over time. When under attack, if small modifications to the protection based on the attack patterns are made, the protection gets stronger and stronger thanks to these modifications.
Integrated DDoS Protection from Inter.link
Inter.link offers a tight integration between IP connectivity services, and DDoS protection available from within our own network.
This “protected transit” delivers the best performance, and we offer it with transparent pricing so that customers get the best protection with the most pricing predictability.
When experiencing an attack, efficiency is crucial and by receiving DDoS Protection from the same provider as your IP Transit, this superior integration means you have greater control, making it easier and therefore much more efficient to protect your infrastructure.
We offer multiple tiers so you can pick the type of protection that suits you best, we provide transparent pricing with no surprises, and we do not bill based on clean traffic.
Interested in who we have already helped with DDoS Protection?
Check out this customer story.
