Arbor DDoS Reviews

We're a hosting company and, in this industry, it's inevitable that you're going to be attacked. We originally purchased the product back in early 2000 for the SQL monitoring. Over the years, DDoS has become a nuisance for other companies we're hosting as well. We had originally purchased it just for internal use, and to predict our own internal infrastructure. But we found an avenue to offer it to our customers as well. It has just grown from there.

It's on-prem to protect our own infrastructure, as well as in the product that we sell to our customers to protect their services. We have a hybrid as well, as we use Arbor Cloud to protect our company's major assets if needed, as a type of over-capacity swing-over.

In terms of the visibility it provides into traffic to the application layer with the Sightline with Sentinel product, it's really good for what it's getting. If you're sampling traffic at the network edge, you don't get the grand scope that you would if you were seeing every single packet. But you're also getting a wide view of information, and at my level, working on the backbone, I need to see the grand scheme of things. If one customer is being scanned or penetrated in one way, it's not as important to me on the network layer as it is to somebody further down the stack. But if I'm seeing all the different scans coming in at a network layer, or bad actors that we have already identified as trying to hit our infrastructure, then that gives me a better idea of what's going on in my network, which is extremely important to me at that point. I can rally the troops to where I need them at that time.

We've gotten to the point where we have worked with this for so long that the protection provided by Sightline with Sentinel, across the different layers of our architecture from the network to the application, is automatic for us. There are very few adjustments that we need to do for customers, even with the wide range of customers that we have. We've been able to configure and to templatize different aspects of the system to fit about 80 percent of our customers, without having to go in there and fine tune. And now, with the addition of the passive protection, we're able to go in and tune a template further, so that it matches the customer even better with what we're doing.

Another way it helps the way our organization functions is because it does have a GUI. I'm able to present information and walk different parts of our leadership through different aspects of attacks, and how we're blocking them. One of the biggest examples of that was my ability to show them, by deploying flow specs, how much traffic I was dropping at the network edge, compared to how much traffic was actually coming into our networks. I showed them how it was saving us from having to upgrade capacity within the data center. It's been our backbone to different aspects of our environment.

In addition, other security groups that may not be at the network level, have the ability to go in and pull NetFlow from Arbor, and start looking for defined signatures of known bad actors out there or known signatures of tools that they may have. 

We're averaging about 1,900 attacks a day. And we're only looking at attacks that could affect our infrastructure. We don't offer this service to everybody within our data centers. Arbor was deployed to protect the infrastructure. There are still a lot of attacks that are getting through that we're not really worried about. We're only looking at the larger types of attacks and engaging them more.

And because this is pretty much automated, we are able to catch attacks now within five to 30 seconds. And in the world of hosting, every single millisecond counts. We offer 99 percent uptime. Without Arbor, we'd probably be around 75 to 80 percent uptime. Attacks are cheap nowadays. People can create a lot of bandwidth for a couple of dollars.

Arbor DDoS also consolidates visibility and the actions we need to take, at the backbone level. Because we have 10 data centers spread out across the globe, and more coming in the future, it gives us better visibility not only into bad actors and traffic coming in, but also the ability to see how traffic is moving from one data center to another. Peer evaluation helps us to see if a peer at a given location is a better use than at another location. Also, point-to-point, from data center to data center, for VPN services that we offer, it has opened up a lot of different aspects of traffic analysis that we weren't really utilizing. Now, we're able to see where we need to adjust our bandwidth, and save money, and other places where we need to raise bandwidth before it costs us money.

It's also helped us get a better idea for future capacity planning, not only for current data centers, but data centers that are going to be in different regions where our company is located. 

And the biggest benefit, for us as A company, are savings from peer evaluations; seeing where we can better utilize the relationship with different providers and if there is the potential for mutual benefit across multiple data centers, globally.

We are using Arbor DDoS for our DDoS platform at A1 Bulgaria. We provide customers with this service.

The platform offers quick mitigation of attacks because Arbor DDoS uses BGP Flowspec, enabling very quick mitigation. The time between detecting an attack and beginning to mitigate it is very short. Additionally, the ATLAS intelligence feeds provide a reputation for IP addresses participating in botnets, which is a significant feature. We can also conduct in-line mitigation and capture traffic in near-real-time, even when there's no alert for slow-rate attacks. If there is an attack, we can mitigate right away for the customer.

The solution was intended for the big clients of Telefonica to clean their internet pipe. We deployed the service to clean the pipe. In some clients' data centers, we implemented a solution that detects and mitigates attacks using Arbor DDoS, our data center solution.

For me, the most valuable feature was the ability to detect attacks within two seconds and gain visibility of all the traffic. Additionally, Arbor DDoS helps with managing the attackers in this area to avoid volumetric attacks, especially when attackers attempt to shut down some clients' sites.

Arbor DDoS is designed for enterprises and is not suitable for small businesses that have only one to ten public IP addresses. Some next-generation firewalls already include this protection.

It has been cost-effective for operation times. Our telecom and ISP customers were spending a lot of time on investigation and root cause analysis of service disruptions. Arbor helps mitigate and protect their networks from the latest protection perspectives.

Arbor DDoS offers security features that automatically detect and prevent DDoS attacks. When a DDoS attack is detected targeting a specific IP, the Arbor device immediately becomes in line with the traffic and actively works to prevent the attack. This auto feature is one of the best aspects of Arbor DDoS, as it ensures timely and effective protection against such attacks.

The solution's IT support needs improvement. So, since we don't have any direct relationship with Arbor, our service provider provides us with the support. Support is an area which needs improvement.

We are a telecom service provider. We provide services to our enterprise customers in India and compliment these services with security layer as a part of our security services.

Being a part of the solution design team, I have been interacting with customers and creating solutions for them to fulfill their requirements. One of the products that we have in our offerings portfolio is around security, which is complimenting our connectivity portfolio. We provide this from Arbor platform, which we have deployed in our network. We have taken the hybrid model from Arbor, and there was a physical installation done in two of the gateways of the country. If the mitigation capacity goes beyond the subscribed boxes, then the Arbor Cloud subscription usage hits and mitigation would be done accordingly.

We have deployed Arbor platform and for our customers, we offer it as a managed service from our network. There are also customers looking for on-premise deployment. 

We are using Arbor's hybrid approach for our overall product build. We have on-premise deployment, however, beyond that we have taken the Arbor Cloud subscription, which is really useful because you secure yourself for anything beyond your current mitigation capacity. This is a really good feature of Arbor that is available.

We use Arbor platform to provide DDoS services for our customers. We provide a clean pipeline solution to our customers. We have seen a tremendous response from many customer segments, particularly during the certain period, which is the time period when our customers expect a lot of traffic volumes coming through to their servers. This is where these DDoS services are being requested by the customer. Predominantly, it is DDoS that we offer to our customers, and mostly customers also want protection from the volumetric attacks, but there are certainly cases where application layer attacks are also looked at being mitigated by customers. In more than 75 percent of the cases, it is a volumetric attack protection that customers are looking for.

We have a vast connectivity portfolio and the Arbor solution complements that. In addition to that, it is also helping us to understand where challenges are coming from, so we can do the mitigation in our own network. We can plan our investments accordingly and help to make the network more secure and robust for ourselves as well as our customers.

Recently we have faced unprecedented times when people overnight started to operate from their homes. At that time, many applications for most enterprise customers were exposed to the open Internet by allowing remote working, from homes or anywhere, and the users were given access to the applications over the open Internet. That posed a serious threat to attacks. At the same time, that provided a lot of opportunities for security companies. When we look at the way in which applications are being consumed by end users, security becomes very paramount, because it's not only making the application available to end users, but it is also making it available in a more secure manner.

The moment that we open up these applications to open Internet, we increase the attack surface for the infrastructure/application, and that is where security becomes very critical. We have seen high adoption of security as a service for our customers, because no one wants to invest on day one in the security infrastructure equipment. This is for obvious reasons: 

1. No budgets being accounted for this
2. Even if budgets are accounted, it becomes practically impossible to deploy such solutions in such short time frame 

What we have seen is there has been a huge demand from our customers in providing these security services as managed services where the service can be enabled within a short time span. Going forward, I will still see these demands from the market, from across all customers be it large or small, and we plan to provide these services as a managed service on pay-as-you-go model.

In my role as a partner of Arbor, I support customers and assist with using Arbor DDoS. I've been involved with it for approximately two years. The primary use cases we encounter include addressing issues related to cloud signaling not connecting and dealing with IP alerts that may indicate malicious activity or false positives.

The feature I find most valuable is the packet capture, which beautifully shows the communication between the client and the server, identifying potential malicious activity. The cloud signaling adjustment is also very valuable as it enables global scrubbing of your links during an attack. Additionally, Arbor DDoS helps scrutinize and filter traffic, improving security measures.

My company is a quad-play operator service provider in Malta. We use it for our own internal infrastructure and clients, where we use both always-on and on-demand.

Our partner has an in-house deployment and can upload it to the cloud as well. This helps to minimize the costs. With in-house deployment, the cost will increase significantly. So, this hybrid approach is advantageous.

When there was an attack, the attack was contained only on the IPs under attack. The rest of the network was not impacted, and that is the most important part.

The solution has helped consolidate visibility and the actions that we have needed to take. Based on the reports which can be generated, one can be in a better position to mitigate and find alternatives when there is an attack. At the same time, we can limit impact on both the attacked IP ranges and customers as well as other services.

Arbor DDoS has helped us achieve our network and application uptime requirements. Uptime has improved.