Arbor DDoS vs F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) comparison

Arbor Networks, the security division of NETSCOUT, is driven to protect the infrastructure and ecosystem of the internet. It is the principle upon which we were founded in 2000; and remains the common thread that runs through all that we do today. Arbor’s approach is rooted in the study of network traffic. Arbor’s suite of visibility, DDoS protection and advanced threat solutions provide customers with a micro view of their network enhanced by a macro view of global internet traffic and emerging threats through our ATLAS infrastructure. Sourced from more than 300 service provider customers, ATLAS delivers intelligence based on insight into approximately 1/3 of global internet traffic. Supported by Arbor’s Security Engineering & Response Team (ASERT), smart workflows and rich user context, Arbor’s network insights help customers see, understand, and solve the most complex and consequential security challenges facing their organizations.

With Arbor DDoS you can automatically identify and stop all types of DDoS attacks and other cyber threats before they impact the availability of business-critical services.

Arbor DDoS is an intelligently automated combination of in-cloud and on-premises DDoS attack protection that is continuously backed by global threat intelligence and expertise.

Arbor DDoS Features and Benefits:

• Global DDoS Protection: Arbor DDoS is an all-in-one solution offering carrier-agnostic, global DDoS protection that is backed by world-class security intelligence as well as industry leading DDoS protection products.
• Worldwide scrubbing centers: Arbor DDoS offers comprehensive protection from the largest DDoS attacks.
• Cloud Only and/or Hybrid Protection: The solution provides the flexibility to design comprehensive DDoS protection that fits your specific environment. It can be deployed as a cloud-only and/or an intelligent combination of in-cloud and on-premise DDoS protection.
• Global Threat Intelligence: Arbor DDoS protection is continuously armed with the latest global threat intelligence from Netscout’s response team.
• Automated DDoS Attack Detection and Mitigation: DDoS attacks can be automatically detected and routed to Arbor Cloud global scrubbing centers for mitigation.
• Managed Services: To manage and optimize your on-premise DDoS protection, you can rely upon the industry-leading expertise of Arbor Networks.
• Multi-layered Approach: As part of a layered approach to DDoS protection, Arbor Cloud provides in-cloud protection from advanced and high-volume DDoS attacks, all without interrupting access to your applications or services. Arbor Cloud’s automated or on-demand traffic scrubbing service defends against volumetric DDoS attacks that are too large to be mitigated on premises.

Reviews from Real Users:

Below are some of the many reasons why PeerSpot users are giving Arbor DDoS an 8 out of 10 rating:

"We use it not only for DDoS detection and protection, but we also use it for traffic analysis and capacity planning as well. We've also been able to extend the use of it to other security measures within our company, the front-line defense, not only for DDoS, but for any kind of scanning malware that may be picked up. It's also used for outbound attacks, which has helped us mitigate those and lower our bandwidth costs.” - Roman L, Sr. Security Engineer at Rackspace

"We have taken on 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.” - Assistant General Manager at a comms service provider

“It is fully mitigating the attacks. We've dealt with other ones where we didn't necessarily see that. The detection is very good. It's also very simple to use. Arbor is a single pane of glass, whereas with other solutions you might have a detection pane of glass and then have to go to a separate interface to deal with the mitigation. That single pane of glass makes it much simpler." - Erik N., Product Manager, MSx Security Services at TPx Communications

F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM) is a high-performance, full-proxy network security solution designed to protect networks and data centers against incoming threats that enter the network. Built on F5’s industry-leading BIG-IP hardware and software platforms, BIG-IP AFM provides a scalable platform that delivers the flexible performance and control needed to mitigate aggressive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) and protocol attacks before they overwhelm and degrade applications and infrastructure availability.

For service providers, BIG-IP AFM IPS does even more, protecting the network edge and performing traffic inspection and protocol adherence for prevalent service provider protocols such as SS7, Diameter, HTTP/2, GTP, SCTP and SIP traffic coming into the network over UDP, TCP, and SCTP.