Arbor DDoS Reviews

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.

Arbor provides a full solution. They provide: 

• The possibility of alarm triggering based on flow packets. 
• Always-on and on-demand
• Implementation of BGP Flowspec. 
• Implementation with their cloud system.
• Good reporting. 

When it comes to some false positives, we need to tweak the system from time to time. There is room for improvement when it comes to the actual mitigation because of some false positives.

I have been using it for more than 10 years now. The solution has changed names over the years. The Arbor suite has evolved a bit over the years, so now we are using Sightline. In the past, it was called Peakflow.

It is quite stable.

The scalability needs to handle going horizontally, apart from the cloud, rather than replacing boxes.

Initially, the solution was not that mature. It has evolved and scaled better over the years.

Being a service provider on a small island, our environment is small in scale. Our network is small compared to other operators. We have 20 users internally: our NOC, IP team, and commercial team.

It took three months once our agreement was done.

Our partner implemented and maintains the system. We use the system to activate mitigation, generate reports, and do some changes. It is self-service, so we are empowered to manage the system.

We rely on third-party deployment. From this third-party and how they interconnect with us, there will always be some tweaking in relation to understanding which links to use and how to avoid possible loops. 

We are also looking to implement BGP Flowspec, which is not yet available because we are not exactly interfacing directly with the Arbor platform, but via separate routers that we interface.

When it comes to DDoS, we are saving by not losing money or clients. Like any insurance, you cannot really quantify it, but you need to have it.

Attacks are getting bigger and bigger. The cost to have proper DDoS mitigation is once a year insurance. It is getting too large to be sustainable. This is not just related to Arbor. DDoS mitigation is more expensive every year.

You need to find a way to get a good offering from Arbor by negotiating a price. That is the challenge. 

See if it is possible to scale using the cloud service.

With respect to the competition, I think that Arbor Sightline reporting is cutting-edge. It is significantly more robust than what the other competitors have, such as, Corero, Radware, and Voxility.

When it comes to the other suppliers, like Corero, Voxility, and Radware, they have automatic mitigation. This will auto-tune to attack changes. With Arbor DDoS, it needs manual intervention. To be fair, I am not sure if that is just our implementation, but that is our understanding for now. 

Another point is how to handle HTTPS encrypted traffic. On that front, there are some options from other vendors to handle HTTPS without the need to install the certificate, where Arbor might need to do some further development there.

With other vendors, you might need third-party software for NetFlow or reporting. In my experience, this is what differentiates Arbor DDoS from the rest.

Overall, I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10), the reporting as a 10 (out of 10), and the mitigation as a five to eight (out of 10).

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'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 provide about 50% of the nation's bandwidth because of the submarine cables we have. We use Arbor to provide DDoS-protected bandwidth to our customers who require it.

The most valuable feature is mitigation, which can blackhole the IP.

An improvement would be to provide information on how pricing is done on different customer levels (e.g. is it done per gig or bandwidth?)

I've been using this solution for six or seven years.

Arbor's technical support is very good, we've had no issues with it.

The price is a little high.

I would rate Arbor DDoS as eight out of ten.

We use it to protect our infrastructure from DDoS attacks. It is used to protect web applications to provide a secure infrastructure for our client.

The artificial intelligence feature is most appreciated. This solution can lower the throughput and clear the traffic, which is something really important for us. It also provides good protection.

It is user-friendly, and its integration has also been really fast. We have many critical applications, and it was easy to integrate Arbor DDoS with our website, mobile application, and web banking.

They should improve the reporting section and make it a little bit more detailed. I would like to have much better and more detailed reports.

I have been using this solution for three months. It was implemented in February.

Its stability is really good.

Because it is on-premise, it has limited capability. That's why in six months, we would like to move to the cloud. Moving to the cloud will also enable us to prevent biometric attacks. It will make it easier for us to protect all the throughput traffic.

Our client is a medium-sized company in Bolivia with around 3,000 employees.

Their technical support is really good. They have a nice workflow.

We had Check Point and Radware solutions. Gartner Quadrant ratings were one of the key factors for going for this solution.

Its initial setup was easy. It was a one-month project, and its implementation was very fast.

Five engineers were involved in its implementation.

I would advise others to do a proof of concept. That's a good way to choose a solution. We did a proof of concept, and it gave us a good idea, so I would advise others to do that.

I would rate Arbor DDoS a nine out of ten. I am really happy with this solution.

We're a managed service provider as well as an internet service provider. We use it to protect our core network from DDoS attacks, and by protecting our core network we can also protect our end customers.

We're in the process of migrating to the newest version, currently. We use the solution in our physical environment, but we also take advantage of their cloud offering.

Previously, we were vulnerable to DDoS attacks, and large-scale attacks could potentially take down parts of our network segments. With the Arbor product, that doesn't happen anymore.

I love the forensics. The forensics give us the ability to look at logs and to look for anomalies and give us traffic information about customers that we might not normally have. We can also use that to assist customers in troubleshooting issues that they might be having. The forensics is what I loved the most.

I struggle with where the product could improve because it's pretty great the way it is.

I would just say more granular reporting, down to our customer level, would be helpful. If we could somehow import customer information in their networks, it would be able to generate reports. It might actually be able to do that right now, and we have just never used it.

I've dealt with other solutions where I said, "I wish it did this," but it didn't. We have tried some other solutions that do what Arbor does and I would often go back to them and say, "Well, I want it to do this," because we already have that now with the Arbor solution. I've dealt with other vendors and I don't see things that they're doing that Arbor doesn't do.

I've been using Arbor DDoS for eight years.

It's very stable. Things do happen and we have had to open support tickets, but that touchpoint with Arbor is very low. There is not a lot of trouble that comes up with it. 

We don't necessarily need to update the firmware versions all the time, although they are available. Sometimes we have stayed with a  version that we were on because it was stable and it was secure. I've dealt with other vendors before where there are constant problems and their solution is, "Well, there's a new firmware version. Upgrade." We don't have those kinds of problems with Arbor.

It's easily scalable. We could add on routers if we wanted to; we could add on more devices to handle more mitigations, or go to the cloud if necessary. If there was a large scale attack, we'd just use their scrubbing centers versus ours. It's very scalable.

It touches a relatively small part of our overall network: It touches our drain points to the internet. But it affects the entire network, which is quite complex. It's protecting our entire network. As our network expands, it can expand with us.

The technical support is very good. We usually get answers right away. We can submit a ticket online or just give them a call and get a quick response.

We didn't have a solution before Arbor, but there was a period of time where we tried another solution. We did not find that solution to be adequate.

With Arbor, when we see DDoS attacks, 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.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup, but I was involved, mid-stream, when we brought in the mitigation side. We are currently replacing our aged infrastructure of Arbor products with a newer version. I'm tangentially involved with that.

The updating process is straightforward. They've done a good job of that. And the fact that we've already deployed it before means we can use the template of the previous deployment to set up the new deployment. So it is easy.

Our implementation strategy is the same, whether for the initial setup or for the updates. We're finding where the drains are on our network and set up the monitoring for those points. Then we create the mitigation side at specific data centers so we can route traffic to those devices and mitigate the traffic.

We have seen ROI for sure because uptime, as a service provider, is critical and the solution helps us maintain 100 percent uptime.

There is room for improvement with the pricing. It is an expensive solution. The issue with the pricing is more the way it is built. Right now we're paying per router, and there's a limitation there. I would like to see bundle-pricing where there is an overall solution cost.

I will periodically talk with other vendors, just to make sure Arbor is really the best solution for us.

Work with Arbor. They have great people to help you make sure it's implemented correctly. And they also have a great training team to help you understand the solution and use it to its fullest advantages.

The biggest thing I have learned from using the solution is seeing all the different types of denial of service attacks that are out there. I have come to understand that they will come in waves and that certain types of customers are more prone to attack than others.

It also lets us understand traffic flows on our network, as far as the usual traffic goes. We can understand what our network looks like. What it looks like at 1:00 pm is very different then what it looks like at 3:00 am. The solution helps us understand that.

The users of Arbor DDoS in our company are only a handful of technicians. Our NOC and some of our security people, engineers, are in there, but it protects tens of thousands of customers for us. For deployment and maintenance of this solution we require two security engineers. They maintain the system and make any configuration changes, if necessary. They handle regular maintenance, if necessary, although it's pretty minimal.

I would rate this product as an eleven out of 10.

It is our ISP, from where we get our internet traffic. We just send it to them and if anything is suspicious or there is some malicious traffic, we talk to them about what kind of traffic it is. If some machine or some router is being attacked by a malicious user, we try to find out the source IP and why this traffic is coming to us. The Arbor solution is deployed on their premises. We just ask them to control or just stop that traffic. They do the filtration. They provide us all the required details to mitigate an attack on any particular machine.

Arbor DDoS is a quick solution when you have identified some of the originating suspicious IPs from which you are getting traffic in your network. If you have identified that some of the email gateways, or any of your web applications, or any of your routers are being attacked, it is effective. You can ask your ISP to block such queries. If the originating IPs are dynamic, it is a little bit difficult for them to identify and block the traffic, but to a certain extent you can minimize the DDoS attack impact with this solution.

In application layer DDoS attacks, it suggests the actions that should be taken. But at the network layer, you can simply block the originating traffic IP and block the port instantly. It depends on how proactive you are and how effective your incident response team is. Once traffic has started on any of your machines, it can be very difficult to manage it, but you can minimize the impact of malicious traffic with the Arbor tool.

The most valuable features include the traffic categorization and control of the traffic. The filtering of the traffic is very precise. When you want to stop some traffic, you precisely stop that traffic.

On the application layer, they could have a better distributed traffic flow. They could improve that a bit. For network data it is very effective, but the application layer can be improved. In today's era, attackers are also developing their skills. Daily, new threats are coming into the environment.

I've been using Arbor DDoS for almost seven years. I am the cyber security architect in our company and we have a SOC manager. We work together as a team and we are the only two people who use it. 

We do have a team and they instantly contact the ISP if any malicious source IP has been detected. It has been about six months since we have faced an incident in which we had to reach out to our ISP to block some traffic. We then isolated that machine later on. We instantly blocked that port and signature file. Our SOC team works on the operations part.

The stability of Arbor DDoS is excellent, whether it is hardware or software stability. Whatever rules are set up inside, it's excellently developed and it excellently manages your good and malicious traffic.

In terms of scalability, it's also excellent. DDoS attacks are not very scalable, but compared with other tools, in terms of mitigating those non-scalable DDoS attacks, it is better. In that way, Arbor is scalable. It is very effective when it comes to mitigating or dealing with DDoS attacks.

We have four SOCs deployed here, and my SOC has one lakh EPS (event per second) capability. It is a big network and we use the biggest telecom operator in India. We just deal enterprise and telecom traffic.

The support is fine. The ISP team works directly with the Arbor team, so they would have a better idea about that part, but from what I know the support is excellent.

We don't have the Arbor solution deployed on-premises. It's with the ISP, so I wasn't involved in the setup or the implementation.

Arbor is the most effective solution, when compared with other tools. Although I only have experience with Arbor, I have read a lot about other tools. Today, attackers are developing their skills like anything. When some of your workstation IPs are hacked, or some of your application vulnerabilities are exposed, Arbor solutions are very much effective. Although you may have very limited competency or tools to deal with today's DDoS attacks, Arbor is effective.

Arbor is very precise as far as network layer traffic monitoring and control are concerned, but in my opinion EDR is a better solution when it comes to the application layer and DDoS. Arbor has its modules but EDR is a better solution to mitigate the application layer DDoS attack.

Arbor's hybrid approach to DDoS protection is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Sometimes it is not able to filter traffic adequately because of the hybrid approach. It only takes action after a bit of time. It starts acting on malicious traffic a little bit late because of the hybrid approach. On the other hand, after seeing all the aspects, the analysis is sensible and perfect. So it depends on from which side we look at this feature.

Network layer DDoS attacks are absolutely big. DDoS attacks cannot be mitigated instantly, it takes time. You have to be very aware of your network and about which machine an attack has reached, and what the network architecture is. All those aspects are responsible for the impact of DDoS attacks. Arbor is not absolute but, comparatively, I find it to be an effective solution.

Overall, it's a great product. It is a very effective product in terms of dealing with DDoS attacks, whether it is network layer attacks or application layer attacks. But it is better in network layer DDoS attacks. It is among the best.

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.