7 Questions You Must Ask Before Hiring a DDoS Mitigation Provider

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

Even though the duration of DDoS attacks might not be as long as before, they are growing both in numbers and intensity. If you don’t have the right protection in place, your website could go down for days or even weeks. To prevent that, businesses tend to hire DDoS mitigation service providers.

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

7 Questions You Should Ask Before Hiring DDoS Mitigation Service

1. What is Your Deployment Model?

Every DDoS mitigation service provider follows a unique model. Make sure that their deployment model aligns with yours — otherwise, the mismatch could lead to even more issues down the line. The most common deployment model DDoS mitigation service providers use:

In an on-premise deployment model, a device is installed which analyzes traffic before reaching your network. This can be a great option if you want to safeguard against low and slow attacks. On the flipside — cloud-based deployment models use scrubbing centers, which monitor the traffic before it reaches your network.

The benefit of the cloud-based deployment model is that you don’t have to install any wearable device. Lastly, the hybrid deployment model gives you the best of both worlds by blending both approaches together. The deployment model you choose should depend on your risk profile, type of attacks, and on-premise installation.

2. What type of Cybersecurity Attacks Can You Protect Against?

There are many different types of DDoS attacks. Each of them targets a different layer of your technology stack. Each type has its own carrier and mitigation techniques. This is where your prospective DDoS mitigation service provider can come into play.

Most DDoS protection providers can prevent DDoS attacks by blocking attackers from flooding your network with illegitimate traffic. What really differentiates great DDoS mitigation service providers from the rest is their ability to efficiently handle attacks at other layers of the technology stack as well.

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

3. How Much Control and Visibility Do You Have Over the Network?

Hire a DDoS mitigation service provider which owns the core of its network with multiple points for analysis. The prospective DDoS protection service you are planning to hire should have a vast network of scrubbing centers. This gives them the capability to find and neutralize the harmful effects of DDoS attacks. Even if the malicious traffic originates from multiple sources simultaneously, it can block all the malicious traffic.

4. What is Your Total Network Capacity?

As I mentioned before, DDoS attacks are growing in frequency and becoming more sophisticated, but they are also becoming larger in nature. You don’t want to hire a DDoS protection service that is not capable of handling a large-scale DDoS attack.

Ask the service provider how much network capacity they have and the maximum size of DDoS attacks they will be able to block. The higher the network throughput, the more capable the DDoS mitigation service is. Another question you need to ask is how rapidly the scrubbing centers can analyze and forward the packets. The faster the speed, the more efficient the DDoS protection.

5. How Quickly Do You Respond?

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

This is why it is important for businesses to work with service providers who can respond to DDoS attacks quickly and restore business operations as soon as possible. The faster they can detect DDoS attacks, the higher chances they have of minimizing the damage. Ask the service provider how fast they can detect attacks and divert incoming malicious traffic.

6. What is Your Pricing Structure?

The cost of DDoS mitigation depends on a variety of factors. Two of the key factors include the time and bandwidth required to repel DDoS attacks. Every DDoS protection service provider follows a different pricing model and charges different rates.

Some might charge you a fixed fee for their DDoS-protected dedicated servers, while others have variable costs attached to them. Assess your needs and risk profile before choosing a service provider that offers a pricing structure that meets your needs perfectly.

7. What Will You Need From Us?

You also need to know what the service provider needs from you. Is their solution easy to set up and use, or does it have a steep learning curve? Ask whether you need to switch to a new internet service provider or make changes to configurations.

Is installing hardware on-premises mandatory? If yes, then how difficult is the setup and installation process, and how much time will it take to get operational? Once you get answers to all these questions, it will be easier for you to choose the best DDoS mitigation service.

Which questions do you ask when opting for DDoS protection? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Mikhail Nilov; Pexels; Thank you!