7 Questions You Should Ask Before Hiring a DDoS Mitigation Provider

There is nothing worse for your business continuity than a sophisticated denial of service attack. Cybercriminals can send a barrage of malicious traffic to overwhelm your servers and render them unable to respond to legitimate requests. This can render your website inaccessible and bring your entire network to its knees.

While the duration of DDoS attacks may not be as long as they once were, their number and intensity are increasing. If you don't have the right protection, your website could be down for days or even weeks. To avoid this, companies tend to hire DDoS attack mitigation service providers.

These DDoS mitigation service providers have the resources, skills, and experience to identify and block these attacks. Unfortunately, not all of them are equally good, which is why you need to do your research before hiring the best DDoS mitigation service provider. In this article, you'll learn seven questions you should ask before hiring a DDoS mitigation vendor.

1. What is your deployment model?

Each DDoS mitigation service provider follows a unique model. Make sure their deployment model aligns with yours – otherwise, the mismatch could lead to even more problems down the line. The most common deployment model used by DDoS mitigation service providers:

On the site on the cloud Hybrid

In an on-premises deployment model, a device is installed that scans traffic before it reaches your network. This can be a great option if you want to protect against weak and slow attacks. On the other hand, cloud-based deployment models use scrubbing centers, which monitor traffic before it hits your network.

The advantage of the cloud-based deployment model is that you don't need to install a portable device. Finally, the hybrid deployment model gives you the best of both worlds by blending the two approaches. The deployment model you choose should depend on your risk profile, type of attacks, and on-premises installation.

2. What type of cybersecurity attacks can you protect against?

There are many types of DDoS attacks. Each of them targets a different layer of your tech stack. Each type has its own transport and attenuation techniques. This is where your potential DDoS mitigation service provider can come in.

Most DDoS protection providers can prevent DDoS attacks by preventing attackers from flooding your network with illegitimate traffic. What really sets the big DDoS mitigation service providers apart is their ability to effectively manage attacks at other layers of the technology stack as well.

Engage a DDoS mitigation service provider that can prevent higher layer attacks that use more protocols such as UDP, TCP, HTTPS tunnel, and SSL. Some DDoS attacks also leverage compression and encryption protocols, while other attacks target the application layer with HTTP GET and POST commands to create congestion in your network.

3. How much control and visibility do you have over the network?

Engage a DDoS mitigation service provider that owns the core of their network with multiple points of analysis. The future DDoS protection service that you plan to hire must have an extensive network of cleaning centers. This gives them the ability to detect and neutralize the harmful effects of DDoS attacks. Even if malicious traffic comes from multiple sources simultaneously, it can block all malicious traffic.

4. What is the total capacity of your network?

As I mentioned before, DDoS attacks are becoming more frequent and sophisticated, but they are also becoming more and more important. You don't want to hire a DDoS protection service that isn't capable of handling a full-scale DDoS attack.

Ask the service provider about their network capacity and the maximum size of DDoS attacks they can block. The higher the network throughput, the better the DDoS mitigation service. Another question you need to ask yourself is how quickly the cleanup centers can scan and forward the packets. The faster the speed, the more effective the DDoS protection.

5. How fast do you respond?

A dedicated denial of service attack not only renders your website inaccessible, but can also disrupt your business continuity. The longer a DDoS attack lasts and keeps your website offline, the more money you will lose in terms of sales and revenue.

This is why it is important for companies...