What to look for in a DDoS Solution

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks require a robust solution that automatically detects, identifies and mitigates DDoS attacks before they become a problem for your organization. Broadly, a solution should deliver a global network with complete visibility and capacity, scalability in response to your needs, and powerful bot protection. 

With so many solutions on the market, it can be confusing to wade through the noise to find the right solution for you. We’ve put together a list of attributes you should look for in a DDoS solution below:

What is a DDoS solution and why do I need one? 

A DDoS solution is your first line of defense against attacks designed to overwhelm your digital infrastructure. These attacks flood your servers, applications, or entire networks with massive volumes of traffic. 

Without adequate protection, your organization could face unexpected downtime, a degraded user experience, reputational damage, or even breach regulatory obligations. A reliable DDoS mitigation solution ensures your services remain accessible, responsive, and secure. 

You need a DDoS solution to:

• Ensure uptime and availability

• Protect customer trust

• Comply with regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA)

Maintain performance during attack attempts

What key capabilities should I look for in a DDoS mitigation solution?

Real-Time Detection and Response

A DDoS solution should offer the ability to detect volumetric, protocol, and application-layer attacks - instantly. It should have low-latency response times (ideally in seconds). Key detection and mitigation features should include:

• Bot Detection and Mitigation: The tool can identify and block malicious bots while allowing legitimate traffic to pass through. 

• Traffic Scrubbing: The tool should redirect suspicious traffic through cleaning centers to remove malicious traffic while allowing legitimate requests to proceed. 

• Rate Limiting: The tool should control the flow of incoming requests to prevent overwhelming your systems. 

• Geographic Filtering: The tool should enable you to block traffic from high-risk regions to reduce the attack surface. 

• Protocol-Specific Controls: The tool should allow you to manage different types of network traffic based on their protocols. 

Scalability and Capacity

DDoS attacks are constantly evolving in size and complexity. Your chosen solution should be able to handle large-scale attacks and adapt to future growth. A good solution should be able to absorb massive attack volumes (hundreds of Gbps to Tbps). 

More specifically, you should ensure that the solution has adequate network capacity and global network visibility:

Network Capacity

Ensure the provider has sufficient bandwidth and infrastructure to absorb and mitigate attacks without impacting your network's performance

Global Network visibility

Look for a solution with a globally distributed network of points of presence (PoPs) to effectively analyze and respond to attacks from various locations,

Multi-Layered Protection

A good DDoS solution will combine network and application layer protection for the most comprehensive defense: 

• Layer 3/4 protection: for volumetric and protocol attacks

• Layer 7 protection: for application-layer attacks like HTTP floods

Automated Mitigation

DDoS attacks can run their course in seconds, leaving security teams with manual or complex solutions struggling to implement effective mitigations before the attack concludes. The result is often retroactive protection to hopefully stop similar attacks next time. Ensuring DDoS attacks are mitigated requires a solution capable of automatically detecting, identifying, and mitigating with no tuning.

Key features to look for include:

• AI- or rule-based automatic mitigation without manual intervention

• Custom policies and thresholds based on your traffic profile

Traffic Visibility and Analytics

Your DDoS mitigation efforts are only as good as what you can measure - you need complete insight into your traffic, attack traffic, and real-time insights into everything happening across your network. 

Look for: 

• Dashboards with real-time and historical traffic insights

Forensics for post-attack analysis:  You should be able to obtain clear and detailed reports on attack activity, allowing for investigation and proactive threat management.  

Integration with existing tool chains and infrastructure

Finding a solution that integrates with your existing toolchains and infrastructure is critical. The right solution will offer:

• Compatibility:  The solution should integrate seamlessly with your existing infrastructure and security systems. 

• Ease of Deployment and Management: The solution should be straightforward to deploy and manage, minimizing operational overhead. 

Integrates with DevSecOps practices: As organizations transition towards DevSecOps practices, rigid, legacy DDoS tooling often stands in the way. It requires constant tuning to limit adverse impacts to legitimate customers and directly impacts delivery velocity as cycles are spent in security QA instead of immediately shipping to production. Look for a solution that supports modern app development. 

Strong Vendor Reputation and Support

Vendor Reputation: Select a reputable vendor with a proven track record in cybersecurity and DDoS mitigation.

Support: Ensure the vendor provides timely and effective support to address any issues or concerns.  

How Fastly can help

Fastly DDoS Protection deploys rapidly and immediately protects any application from disruptive and distributed attacks. Leveraging our network’s massive bandwidth and adaptive techniques, it automatically keeps you performant and available without any required configuration. Fastly DDoS Protection is best for teams trying to enhance resiliency, create consistency in their cloud spend, or move towards a solution provider that operates more like a partner than just a vendor.

Fastly DDoS Protection works with modern software delivery workflows, not against them, automatically protecting your apps and APIs from disruption. No matter your architecture, you can deploy Fastly’s DDoS Protection to gain speedy, scalable defenses without any upfront tuning – or any required tuning, even as you ship changes on demand. This facilitates better cross-functional work between teams, as security doesn’t impact DevOp's ability to ship code smoothly to production.

If you’d like to learn more, contact us.