Arbor DDoS Reviews

Our business is to provide a DDoS protection solution for our customers. Our customers are banks, financial groups, etc.

We might develop some DDoS protection services for our customers under our Internet umbrella. We detect and filter traffic using Arbor DDoS in our network. 

We use it as a BGP or prompt, as a telecom service provider. We have SP and TMS, and that is all our architecture.

We resell on-premise the Arbor edition and install at our customers' site, specifically the Availability Protection System (APS) system.

It protects huge attacks on our Internet system over our network. 

We provide more granular application protection using the APS system, which is located at customer sites.

Our concern is to provide flexibility. We decided to move to this DDoS solution. We wanted to install some local filtering service in the regions. We wanted to be able to add or remove some mitigation capacity to our regional services, which is vital for us. So, we decided to develop these new features to our DDoS service.

Every day or month, we have found some new attack, but I don't think that is very important. It is just the evolution of attacks. We fix it and make a description, so we will be aware when some new attacks come. I think that the Arbor DDoS and APS solutions are quite enough at the moment, as they mitigate all attacks that we face.

The most valuable feature is the ability to work in BGP. It is not important to provide all traffic in a mitigation system every time. We have a lot of customers, and only when a proxy is detected do we use it. This has reduced the cost of our solution. 

We would like the ability to decrypt APS traffic.

We need a SaaS model for the solution.

I opened a ticket with Arbor for the ability to localize numbers of our customers in BGP sessions. This has not been resolved.

We have been using Arbor DDoS for seven years, since 2013. 

It is quite stable. There are no major important bugs, though maybe some small ones. 

There are around five people who maintain it 24 hours a day.

It is quite scalable and effective. You can add new integration services quite easily. 

There are around 60 end users/customers of this solution.

They have good support. Tickets are resolved efficiently in time with Arbor engineers.

It was quite complicated and complex to set up. 

Several engineers were required to deploy it.

There were huge attacks in October, around 62 attacks at 30 gigabits per second, at one of our banks. We used Arbor DDoS to mitigate these attacks, and it performed great.

The solution has a huge price, but we are a global company so we receive global pricing, which is why we chose Arbor. We also receive good prices for Russia.

We also bought the Sentinel feature to use its flow spec because we needed to know how much traffic will be mitigated on our borders. We haven't used it yet, but we are planning on using it in the Spring. We found that the combination of the Sentinel feature with Arbor DDoS going forward is the most important feature.

We do not use the Arbor Cloud DDoS solution because it is too costly. We decided to make our proprietary cloud solution designed by our company.

Several solutions were tested, then we chose Arbor DDoS.

We evaluated several solutions, like NSFOCUS, three months ago, and decided to continue to go with Arbor. Another solution was similar to Arbor because they have a very sophisticated mitigation system. However, they still don't have a system that can analyze traffic by BGP, and their solution was to integrate with Arbor. We decided not to do that. 

Arbor is the solution for telecom services on the market.

Arbor is still the leader versus many vendors and products, which is why we decided to integrate with the Arbor solution for another three years. The solution has met our requirements.

I would recommend using Arbor DDoS.

We will buy the next version on virtual machines. We will buy a server separately with the on-premise solution, then install it on our servers where it would be virtual.

We have been thinking about creating our own DDoS solution using firewalls from other vendors.

We are looking to buy two distributed servers this year that we will need to test locally.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10). Arbor DDoS is a stable solution that fulfills our requirements for DDoS protection services.

As an operator, we use Arbor antiDDoS system to protect our backbone, protecting the network and our assets like DNS.I'm involved in the validation and testing of the solution. 

The solution is installed in our lab, with a simulated full network. We can send some regular traffic as well as DDOS traffic, using some testing tools like IXIA system and opensource tools. 

For testing, we simulate some regular traffic, as background traffic, and we added some attacks on the network with attack tools. We can monitor what's sent to the network, and we can monitor what's received by the victim. In this case, we can assess which part of the attack was stopped by the system.

Arbor DDoS helps consolidate visibility on traffic and on DDOS attacks attempts. It can perform direct mitigation action on the network, which is important. It has also helped us achieve our network and application uptime goals.

I like all the features together as a whole. It's a global solution that fits our needs. Detection is really important for us—the ability to trigger mitigation with TMS and the quality of mitigation.

What is also really important is to directly engage in mitigation on network elements, such as routers or switches, in addition to TMS mitigation. The capacity of the mitigation and the capacity to distribute mitigation on the routers are important. Using this solution as a hybrid approach to DDoS protection is an advantage. It's an important tool for managing the natural quality of service. We're quite confident about the solution and the evolution.

I think Arbor DDoS should be more open to other systems, in the sense of coordination between mitigation centers, like for example the capacity to ask the upstream transit provider for mitigation.

Netscout's Arbor allows it, but between Arbor systems only. It should be more open to Third party systems, that's what I mean by "openness" : evolution from Netscout signaling protocol to standardized DOTS protocol (DDOS Open Threat Signaling)

Implementation could also be improved regarding distribution of mitigation directly on network elements.

I've been using Arbor DDoS for testing for about a year.

Arbor DDoS is stable and robust, as seen during testing phase and with feedback from the field.

According to the operational team, there are few tickets open on the Netscout/Arbor site, but I don't have a precise figure, as I'm only involved in testing phase.

Arbor DDoS is scalable, both horizontally and vertically. It has good visibility making things quite obvious. There are some price issues with scalability, but technically speaking, the solution is fully scalable.

Technical support was knowledgeable and responsive.

The initial setup is quite complex. It isn't easy to do the configuration, but it's okay once it's done. Arbor's implementation strategy was to monitor first and provide all the configuration or the correct profiling for this system after it's considered safe.

NETSCOUT's team deployed our solution.

Arbor DDoS is quite expensive, especially for the TMS mitigation part

We compared it with others actors in antiDDOS domain, such as Nokia Deepfield and others. There are some differences, but generally, the logic is the same.

Arbor Networks, vendor of the solution, has been in DDoS visibility protection for more than ten years, which affected our decision to go with it. We assessed the company's stability (acquired by Netscout), which was part of the decision.

I would advise potential users to try the NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS system but also to check on other solutions.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Arbor DDoS a seven.

We are using it for application availability, for its perimeter protection against DDoS and such service-exhausting attacks. Our goal is service availability and protecting our infrastructure against reputational damage and other penalties that could be incurred as a result of outages and malicious activities.

In terms of availability, we have never suffered any service exhaustion or services unavailability. Credit goes to the solution in that we have probably suffered a number of attacks, but they were mitigated by the tech solution without any notable impact - automation. We have benefited a lot from it.

It gives us visibility into what's going on with our externally exposed services. The better the visibility it means we are able to take better informed actions to improve our infrastructure, both inside and outside the LAN.

And it has definitely helped us to achieve our network and application uptime requirements for our business and its external stakeholders. We have always maintained a very high service availability. Previously, the work involved was so intense to ensure we could support that availability. The uptime was the same then as it is now, almost 99.99 percent availability. But back then, threats were not as evolved and sophisticated as they are now. In the seven years we have been using the tool, we have continued with availability of services as before. But today, without the Arbor solution, I believe we would have suffered quite a number of service availability issues.

The auto-mitigation and upstream signaling are awesome. With the upstream signaling, this is where the application automatically raises an alarm that the data-line is over-utilized (potentially resulting in service unavailability) or is under attack (volumetric attack). The upstream service provider will then start scrubbing and black-holing malicious connections as a means to clean up the line and relieving the load. The fact that it's automated means I don't have to sit the entire time and always be looking out for threats coming through. It does it almost automatically, without any intervention by me.

They are putting quite a good amount of effort into their research to make their products stand out from the rest.

Day by day, the solution is actually getting smarter and more useful.

I haven't found anything to complain about or anything that they need to improve on.

I have been using Arbor DDoS for close to seven years now.

It's a very well-developed tool. I'm quite impressed. I'm happy with its performance. Stability-wise, it's a good tool. Support is also very impressive.

For my environment, there is no need for growing the platform. We currently have about 5,000 endpoints. But from what I've seen, and the way we deployed it, it looks quite scalable.

I've used NETSCOUT's technical support a number of times. I would rate it at 8 out of 10.  They are doing well, there is always room for improvement. Their technical knowledge is on point, and their turnaround time is on point.

We did not have a previous solution.

The decision to use Arbor was based on their track record and capabilities - they stood out very well.

It's not complex. If you know what you want to use the tool for, the placement, and you know what you want to protect, the setup is very straightforward. It requires minimal downtime to deploy the solution. I found it quite easy.

Deployment took about two hours, but that time includes internal delays. From the moment you start setting it up, it takes no more than 30 minutes. The longest part, before you deploy the technology, is learning your network by monitoring it. That could take a long time, depending on the timeframe that you want to benchmark on. It could take, say, a month, just to get an idea of how your network behaves. But in terms of setting up the device, it should take an hour, tops.

We had three people involved in the initial setup. All are network engineers.

Post-deployment maintenance on our side consists of just the regular updates of the software. 

Implementation was both inhouse and vendor supported - vendor support was great, very knowledgeable resources.

ROI comes from the fact that we've never suffered any outages. In the absence of Arbor, if we were to be compromised, the cost would be way more than the cost of the solution.

The solution is a bit costly if you're on a tight budget, but it's worth the price that they are charging - the ROI is notable in a long run.

I've only used the Arbor solution, so I haven't had any hands-on exposure to other technologies. But from the bit that I've read, and based on the ratings of the other solutions, nothing compares closed to what Arbor anti-DDoS offers. I've tried to compare it with the F5 Silverline solution, but the way that solution does threat mitigation is not as advanced or as comprehensive as what Arbor does.

My advice is "Go for it." It's a great tool. If you're concerned about the availability of your services, I highly recommend it, without any hesitation. If you regard your brand or organization as valuable, then Arbor is the tool for you.

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.

I'm a network engineer by trade. 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, as we get charged for outbound traffic. But the biggest use right now is for DDoS.

I like Arbor's hybrid approach to DDoS protection. It's a really good setup. We have the on-premise devices and we can monitor and protect our own infrastructure and that gives us a good handle on that traffic. Since we offer it as a service to our customers, those customers really don't want their traffic leaving the data center. Since we're global, when we get to Europe, there are places where that's not possible. So having a hybrid approach, and especially now with the new features that they're installing, we can kick up to Arbor, if needed, to protect our infrastructure and still have visibility within our own deployment to see how traffic looks without having to go to the third-party portal to log in and see traffic.

Its ability to incorporate DDoS with visibility and protection from the network layer up to the application layer, through the use of the Smart Data feature, works really well. You get a lot more visibility than you would with just NetFlow, especially when we get into the situations where we're in the DDoS and seeing every single package that's coming through. In that situation, a wider scope of information is available not only to us but to other security teams as well. We coordinate with our other security teams, further down the stack, and are able to mitigate at different levels using the information that we're pulling from Arbor. We call it the "security onion." We mitigate at different layers.

Their RESTful API is still a work-in-progress. They're pushing out different versions of the API with each code upgrade.

I would also like more visibility into their bad actor feeds, their fingerprint feeds. We try to be good stewards of the internet, so if there are attacks, or bad actors within our networks, if there were an easier way for us to find them, we could stop them from doing their malicious activity, and at the same time save money.

The company has been using Arbor DDoS for 20 years now. I have been using it for 11 years.

The overall stability is great. In the 11 years that I've worked with it, I've had to replace three devices because of an issue with the actual hardware or software. And in my line of business, that's beyond awesome. We have replaced more backbone devices in that time, in one data center, than Arbor devices.

Scalability is great, at least at the hosting level. Tier-1s may have bigger issues with scalability as far as actual filtering devices go. But they've gone to virtual machines now as well, where they're able to deploy these virtual devices in a way that they couldn't with hardware devices, and at a better cost.

If we can find another use for increasing visibility, we're always glad to help. One of the things that we've found in the past, from security incidents, was that different groups were seeing different issues at different times and nobody knew about it until everybody together came afterwards to discuss the problems or the issues that happened. So we're coordinating with other departments within our organization, not only to provide our feeds, but other feeds from other security tools.

Their technical support is excellent. One of the biggest things about Arbor is their knowledge. We're usually about a step behind when it comes to their code — that's just engineering caution — so by the time we run into an issue, they have already seen it, most of the time, and are able to fix the issue for us before it becomes a bigger issue. There have been times when they practically contact us about possible patching that we may need, just to circumvent any future problems.

I'm in a position where I've been affiliated with Arbor for such a long time, that I know a lot of their top engineers, and any kind of features that we request are usually fast-tracked.

We had Cisco products. We switched because the usability was just too complex. With Cisco, we were able to adjust many things, but there were way too many buttons to push, to help you out. Arbor gives you a great balance between simplicity and surgical precision that I haven't been able to find in other products.

I do test other DDoS products. And one of the things that I have found is that there's a lot of what I call "black magic" software, where you click on a button or switch and it automatically does what you want it to do, but you really have no understanding of what it's doing on the back-end. With Arbor, and being in engineering, you have a great idea of what's going on and how it's being utilized, which makes troubleshooting issues during mitigations a lot easier. If you know exactly what a countermeasure is doing, then you're able to precisely say if it's an issue with your system or if it's further down the stream on another device, a firewall or a load balancer, etc.

The setup depends on the network, but from start to finish, they're really good at helping you set this up. Their sales engineers are very hands-on people. It's pretty much straightforward for a mid-level engineer to set up, without any real help.

We redeploy new hardware every five years, and we can redeploy 48 devices within three days with no network interruption. And we can deploy a single data center for DDoS within four hours, max.

We have a standard implementation strategy. We have them on standby. We have them deliver all their devices with any code that we're going to be upgrading to or running. For the most part, they will stage any type of code or patches that we may need. From there, it's pretty much unplug it and plug it back in.

We have a team of three for deployment. At any given time, one way or another, I would say close to 150 people are using it. Their roles include peer coordinators. We also have our design and build engineers looking at capacity. There are people on my team that deal with nothing but DDoS attacks. I have network operations dealing with network visibility. I have internal SOCs that are looking for any kind of malware or bad actors trying to invade our corporate network. We also have our customer SOC desk looking at the internal data center backbone for customers.

We have definitely seen ROI. DDoS is something that was not supposed to stay around, but it has been around for quite a long time now. If you're going to be in the internet business, the chances of your being attacked are great. We've been able to incorporate it into our service where it pays for itself very quickly.

Our deployment can pay for itself within a year, and we're protecting close to $80 million of monthly revenue of customers that are using the service. 

And that's just a portion of what it's being used for. The capacity planning and being able to block outbound DoS attacks, saving us bandwidth, adds up as well. The last metrics we had there, we were sitting at close to $375,000 per data center by reducing outbound attacks. That also makes our facility less attractive to bad actors to use as a jumping off point or as a reflection point.

You pay for what you get. Like any other consumer product, there are things out there that are extremely cheaper than Arbor, but you're also not going to get the type of information that you do with Arbor. And there are some other companies out there that are a little pricier than Arbor, that are not going to mitigate and give you the type of information that you want. Arbor is striking a good balance between pricing and what they deliver.

In  terms of costs in addition to their standard licensing fees, it depends. There are other feeds that you can subscribe to. There are different services that they're starting to bundle up with NETSCOUT, that you'll be able to subscribe to. There are some feeds on proactive alerting. Because they have such a big visibility into the global internet network, they're able to see botnets discussing or targeting potential customers of yours, and they can actually make you aware of such. They have different feeds that they get from their security team that help you mitigate DoS attacks without any kind of intrusion on your part. You don't have to make any kind of adjustment to countermeasure. These are pre-configured signatures that they see in the wild and that feed is delivered straight to your mitigation device and can mitigate DoS attacks that common users wouldn't be able to do by themselves. That is great for those who are first taking on the product and getting into taking on DDoS attacks.

We've looked at Radware among others. Some of the other ones are really GUI-heavy. They have pretty pictures and you can click around, but that's the extent of what you can do. You can't go in and fine tune some of these systems. They're either very network-mitigation-type heavy, or they're more on the application. They're not a really good balance of both, which I've been able to find with Arbor. Another thing I have found is that a lot of these competitors have feeds. And once you start diving into their feeds and seeing where their sources are, a lot of them have Arbor as one of their feeds.

One of the reasons that we stay with Arbor is its evolution to meet growing concerns around DDoS attacks. My job is to find the best product out there to protect our infrastructure. I've looked for years and years, and continue to look, and Arbor has been able to give us the best results overall, as well as the best equipment, with the least number of headaches. We get a great bang for our buck. Requests that we put in for features are met with either a great explanation of why they can't fit it in, or are deployed months after we've requested them. Arbor's biggest feature is not their equipment, rather it's their knowledge, because they get such great visibility into the global network. They're able to see things that are months ahead of hitting the rest of the industry and are usually one step ahead of what's about to hit.

The new feature that stands out compared to their competition is their automatic flow specs. Flow specs are nothing more than dynamic ACLs on the network edge, using PGP. What this does is it surgically reduces the amount of capacity we need to use from their TMS (threat mitigation system) and now use the network edges, the routers, to drop the traffic that's not wanted. There are a lot of what we call "dumb attacks," reflection amplification attacks, that can decimate a data center. With flow specs, we're able to drop that traffic before it even enters into our network. That's exactly what you want. You want to be able to stop and drop traffic further up the stack, as much as possible.

Another feature that they're working on, that I'm excited to see, is the ability to share these flow specs, these rules, with your provider. So if we have an attack, and we have AT&T or another of the big Tier-1s, we can send them our rules, and they can block the traffic at their network at that time, which reduces the liability to our network as well.

They're also starting to put out reporting features. It's often hard to take what you see at the technical level and push that up to your C-level type of executives. They like pretty graphs and you can't really do that with the information from NetFlow. But using the new executive reporting makes it a lot easier for us to justify it for next year's budget. And if there are budget cuts somewhere, we can always show to our leadership how useful this deployment is, to get the additional capital or OpEx, if need be.

These features are available in competing products, but not to the extent that Arbor has in its reporting. Reporting is available in a lot of products, but the information they provide is something you have to go in and actually create. And you're limited to what you're able to create. With Arbor, and its REST API, we can now create all kinds of reports that suit the person or the audience that we're trying to get to.

There's no other competitor that I'm aware of, right now, that's working with the providers to be able to share flow specs between them. That's one of the advantages that Arbor has in working with something like 95 percent of the Tier-1 providers. Arbor has a little more insight into the bigger providers that we rely on. Other competitors have not gone to that level yet.

Talk with their sales engineers and understand the different uses of Arbor. If you're just looking just for a pure DDoS product, there may be other solutions within Arbor that are better to use, or different feeds that may be beneficial. Maybe you're more into capacity planning or peering analysis, and there are other things in addition to those that you can do with Arbor. If you're buying it for DDoS, you still do capacity planning and peer evaluation for the same cost using the same license. But what I've found with other people that use the product is they're single-use. Some buy it for DDoS and only use it for DDoS. They don't take into account the other information that they could be pulling from it.

The sheer amount of traffic that's out there in the network is one of the biggest things I've learned from using the solution. Looking at north-south traffic, traffic coming into our data centers and out of our data centers, it's a lot higher than what we had thought we would see when we first started using Arbor. It helped us to provide an infrastructure that was future-proof. Before we started understanding the different uses of Arbor, we would upgrade our routers on the edge, only to have to upgrade two or three years later when the actual router was still viable but it just wasn't able to control or handle the capacity. Now, we're able to put devices in place that are future-proof and that reduces our costs by not having to replace those devices every so often because they ran out of bandwidth.

Another thing we found was the number of bad actors that were living within our environment. When cloud first started popping up, everybody rushed to get their own clouds up and running. What wasn't taken into account was that there was a lot of malicious traffic that was being generated by these types of environments. They gave us a better understanding of cloud computing and the security issues that we would be facing as we tried to expand that environment.

Sightline with Sentinel does not yet communicate information upstream to our service provider around attacks, so that they can stop the attack closer to the attacker. It's something that we've been working on with Arbor for many years. There are some programs out there that Arbor is working on where we can communicate with other deployments that have Arbor. From the engineering perspective, we're all for it, not only at my company but even at the major Tier-1s. It's when you get up to higher management that we hit the roadblocks. Everybody in security wants to share information, but nobody wants to say anything either.

More and more people are coming around to the idea that they need some type of DDoS protection as part of their security posture. We tell customers that there's no one silver bullet out there that's going to do it all. Arbor does a great job of mitigating DoS attacks but we don't want to do all the blocking with Arbor devices, so further down the stack you want load balancers and firewalls to help you out.

The fact that Arbor has been in DDoS visibility and protection for more than 10 years definitely affects our confidence in it. I've been with other providers that use Arbor as well and that's one of the things that is always brought up, the confidence level. Deploying this on my network and the visibility it's going to give me is hands-down better, compared to an up and coming cheaper product that may claim to have better abilities to mitigate DDoS attacks. But they don't have the visibility that you really need. That's the key asset that Arbor has because they've been in the business for so long and have these great relationships with these big Tier-1 providers. They're not only able to provide the necessary equipment but, more importantly, the knowledge that comes with it. At the root of things, all DDoS vendors basically do the same thing, they drop traffic. It's the knowledge of what type of traffic to drop that is extremely important, to me and others who are in the same business. When you have visibility into one-third of the global internet, you have great visibility into what's going to happen in the future as well.

I would give Arbor DDoS a nine out of 10. There's always room for improvement. With DDoS products, there's always an evolving merry-go-round of different attacks. For me, giving it a 10 would be that silver bullet where it is going to handle all your attacks. Arbor will be straightforward with you and let you know that it's not that silver bullet and that there are times when its system is not the best system for the use that you have. One of the downfalls, at least on our site, has been that its visibility into the application layer in the monitoring mode is not the best, and that's because it's sampling traffic. Once it's in a mitigation and seeing packet-for-packet, it's devastating to see the amount of information you can pull. That's why we've gone ahead and implemented different Arbor devices lower down, closer to the application, to give us even more visibility.

We use the product for DDoS settings to prevent malware attacks.

The product allows us to check real-time progress, including latency and network activities.

The product could have end-to-end platform visibility, including connectivity and bandwidth, similar to Cisco.

We have been using Arbor DDoS for seven or eight years. At present, we use the latest version.

The product is very stable.

It is a scalable product. Its scalability depends on the bandwidth. It manages around 50,000 internet banking customers.

The technical support services are excellent.

The initial setup is easy. It involves configuring network connectivity, including public IP addresses and firewall/router configurations. It requires setting up security rules or access controls on Arbor to control which traffic is allowed through. It's important to ensure that traffic from the Internet has a few diversions before reaching the firewall. It takes approximately six hours to complete. The system needs to take a downtime for maintenance. It requires around 13 minutes to complete.

The product’s availability and support services are good. I rate it a ten out of ten.

The solution is used for protection and to review any potential attack.

The solution is flexible, easy to implement and has an efficient technical support team.

The implementation should be made easier. 

I have been using the solution for more than five years.

It is a stable solution. It could be more stable depending on the upgrade of the software. I rate the stability an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable solution.For the cloud version the scalability is ten out of ten but for the on-premises, it depends on the sizing of the file. The solution is best for medium sized enterprises. All our clients are medium -sized enterprises.

The technical support is good.

The initial setup is easy. It takes two days to be deployed. One or two engineers are required for the deployment depending on the use cases.

I see a Return on Investment.

The pricing of the solution is cheap.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

Arbor DDoS is not used for enterprise companies but by some other companies, including NIDC, a government entity.

Analytics and its attack mitigation capabilities are valuable features of the solution.

It is an expensive product, so there is room for improvement in terms of pricing.

I work for the sales department. So, I've been using Arbor DDoS for three to four years. My company has a partnership with Arbor.

The product is stable. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

The product is scalable. I rate its stability a ten out of ten.

It is an expensive product. I use this product for its different features.

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.

We are not using it in our organization. I'm working for a system integrator, and we have implemented this solution for our customers. Our customers use it as the out-of-path DDoS protector and to reroute the traffic through BGP to TMS to clean the traffic and put back the clean traffic.

Reporting is quite good. There are several pages of reporting on DDoS attacks, and you can find all the details that you need.

It's quite good out-of-path equipment. It works fine automatically for out-of-path.

There should be an automatic way to configure it to monitor traffic and decide which is an attack and which is not. In Arbor, you need to tweak and set all parameters manually, whereas in Check Point DDoS Protector, you can select the lowest parameters, and over the weeks, Check Point DDoS Protector will learn the traffic and you can then tighten some of the parameters to decide which traffic is regular and which is malicious. Arbor needs to be much more adjustable like Check Point.

I don't use it in-line. I know that they have equipment for in-line protection for DDoS, but it takes many hours to configure the traffic, and it needs to be constantly monitored. It's not as usable as Check Point. For in-line, the configuration takes too long. You need to dedicate one person to work with it full-time, and usually, customers are not willing to do that.

We have been using Arbor DDoS for the last two years. 

It's quite stable. Similar to Check Point, there is no problem with stability in the new version. I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability.

It's quite scalable. It's easy to implement more equipment. I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of scalability.

It's more complex than Check Point, and it depends on the topology and what customers need. I'd rate it a three out of ten in terms of ease of setup. All of its deployments are on-premises.

I don't deal with the pricing, but it seems that you need to get basic support in order to upgrade the software and implement some patches.

As an out-of-path DDoS protector, it's quite good. I don't have any experience with in-line, but I saw that it's necessary to have one person to comfortably work with it. For out-of-path DDoS protection, Arbor DDoS would be a better solution. For in-line DDoS protection, Check Point DDoS Protector would be a better solution.

Overall, I'd rate Arbor DDoS an eight out of ten.

Our company uses the solution to protect applications such as web DNS and file servers from DDoS attacks coming through the Internet's application layer. 

We also protect our devices and components such as firewalls, IPSS, and WAFs. 

The stateless device format means that the box is very strong for preventing DDoS attacks.

The solution is user friendly and the graphical user interface can be used for everything without logging into the CLI.

The box includes embedded bypass modules so bypasses can be performed without outages.

Hardware modules do not need to be changed when upgrading licenses for additional capacity.

A behavioral traffic analyzer and SSL inspection tool need to be added. 

The solution needs to enhance its features to compete with other tools. Lately, Arbor has made some improvements but they are not ones that are expected or ones that would better align the solution with competitors. 

For example, the solution announced it was releasing SSL inspection in 2020. After a while, they realized the feature was failing so they stopped mentioning it and instead provided another solution which required purchase of a different box. This created a complex topology that is not cost efficient. I have to set aside extra budget so this is not an improvement or a solution for me. Competitors handle the same feature within their own single box.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is really stable. It is the most stable device in our topology. 

Technical support is very good and responds quickly. If I get any box faults, one phone call gets me to an engineer for troubleshooting. 

I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

I did not use other solutions. 

The setup not complex and a simple configuration takes about one hour. 

An advanced configuration takes up to twenty days because I run simulations and check results. It is not constant work but provides useful results. 

Our team of one system architect and three system engineers implemented the solution in-house. 

The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is expensive when compared to other tools. 

The first option is a DDoS or throughput license that never expires after purchase. You can use the box until its end of life. 

The second option is a subscription license that is purchased for one, three, or five years. It includes some additional features and services that are optional. 

Product or technical support is a separate license that must be renewed every one or three years. 

I have evaluated other solutions in a demo environment. 

Radware is the leading DDoS solution right now and a strong competitor. I found that its graphical interface is complex and hard to handle. It takes time to configure properly, is hard to read, and is poor for reporting. 

I recommend the solution and rate it a seven out of ten.

If the solution adds a behavioral traffic analyzer and SSL inspection tool, then I rate it a nine out of ten. 

I primarily use Arbor DDoS for scrubbing.

Arbor DDoS's best feature is that we can put the certificates in, and it will look at layer seven and the encrypted traffic and do the required signaling.

An improvement to Arbor DDoS would be to make evaluation licenses and virtual machines available. This would allow us to learn the system and to spread word about the product to others.

I've been using Arbor DDoS for almost five years.

Arbor DDoS is very stable.

Arbor DDoS is scalable.

The complexity of the setup depends on the user's experience, but it's very quick to deploy.

Arbor DDoS has given us a very good ROI - I would rate it five out of five.

I would rate Arbor DDoS ten out of ten.