IBM Cloud Internet Services is a set of edge network services for securing internet-facing applications from DDoS attacks, data theft, and bot attacks, as well as optimizing their web apps or ensuring global responsiveness and the ongoing availability of their internet-facing applications.
$275
per month, per domain
NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection security software offers protection across multiple layers of the OSI model. It provides security measures for Layer 2 (Data Link layer) through Layer 7 (Application layer), ensuring complete protection for network infrastructure.
In terms of business challenges, it simplifies the job of my engineers and significantly increases the productivity of my teams when they collaborate with IBM teams all over the world. Now that we have completed a proof-of-concept using the services supplied by IBM, we expect it to assist us in managing them more efficiently; thus far, management has been straightforward.
If you receive layer 7 attacks on a regular basis targeting critical infrastructure that needs to stay up, this is a good fit in conjuction with out-of-band TMS or in-band APS. This is obviously going to be contingent on your budget.
Not a good fit
If you are looking to mitigate large volume attacks that are saturating your uplinks to the Internet and taking your entire network down, this (or any on-premesis solution, for that matter) is not the solution for you. Look into any external DDoS scrubbing service to let them take the blow and return only the clean traffic to you.
The Peakflow system has many features similar to an IPS with the ability to block traffic based on layer 7 signatures, but country code, etc and may be tempting to use this as an IDS/IPS solution. This will cause issues for a few reasons, cheif among them is that the system is not intended for permananent or indefinite mitigations. Additionally, signitures are only updated on software version upgrades.
Arbor's layer 7 countermeasures are very good out of the box, but it is very easy to reconfigure values and see the impact in real-time.
Peakflow SP provides fairly detailed traffic analysis and breakdown for top-N data such as top talkers, top ASNs, top ports and so on. They offer "SP Insight" as a product to build in more powerful reporting on the already-collected metrics with an interface very similar to Kibana or one of its many forks. We are not licensed for that so I can't speak to its capabilities.
Arbor allows for a good amount of automation. Fast flood detection ensures that if pre-determined thresholds are quickly exceeded, preconfigured mitigations can be started or in the event of an extremely large volumetric attack you can trigger an Arbor Cloud (sold separately) mitigation or a remotely-triggered blackhole announcement to drop traffic to the attacked destination IP address(es) upstream.
ATAC (Arbor support) is very helpful. The level of support our organization maintains covers ATAC performing all update functions to all Arbor appliances - SP and TMS.
Arbor is a highly expensive company. this was the major reason behind not going for the Arbor sightline in the first place. Although its features are good but the cost is unjustifiable.
The implementation and the understanding of this tool are full of complexity and perplexity.
I am looking forward to having a new update on it. They used to update their versions quite frequently but it's been a long time they haven’t updated or maybe it is not in their priority lists right now.
I have used Salesforce to explore it as an app but I have found them both able to solve my needs and requirements when it comes to security. While I choose IBM Cloud Internet Services for more accessibility, a better price was available with Saleforce. Although that is just my observation.
We chose Cisco because we had past experience with some Cisco products and we were ready to invest a high cost for Cisco Secure but unfortunately it didn’t come up to our expectations and left us in despair. The speed, the price and the analytics of Cisco, everything was just average but when we moved to Arbor we came to realize that market still have some good network analytics tool.
