From time immemorial, humans always had to find ways to deal with their fellow troublemakers.
Whether it's rival tribesmen disguised as friendly visitors to sneak into villages and infiltrate them or mischievous pranksters trying to pass as fellow tribesmen to cause havoc for fun, humans have always had to develop ways to protect their communities from illegitimate entrants.
The same is true in today’s digital landscape, where the stakes are equally high. Malicious actors, motivated by the need for fun through mischief or to gain competitive advantage, may attempt a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
DDoS attacks disrupt the regular traffic or operations of websites or online services, making them inaccessible to legitimate users. This can lead to major inconveniences for users, damaging the business’s reputation and causing significant financial losses.
To prevent DDoS attacks, businesses employ DDoS protection software.
G2's DDoS Protection and Cloud DDoS Mitigation categories were recently merged, resulting in the creation of DDoS Protection Software. This blog will explain why this merger happened and what’s changing, highlighting some interesting insights into the DDoS protection software space.
DDoS protection: in the beginning
DDoS attacks in the early days of the internet were relatively unsophisticated. They were often performed by overloading a website with traffic from a single source. Such attacks, although disruptive and inconvenient, could be typically resolved using basic security measures such as rate limiting, adjusting firewall rules, and filtering traffic from malicious IP addresses.
However, by the late 90s, attackers started employing botnets to launch coordinated attacks. This significantly increased the scale and impact of DDoS attacks. In response to increasingly complex attacks, specialized DDoS protection solutions arose.
Why we merged the DDoS Protection and Cloud DDoS Mitigation categories
In the initial days of DDoS protection services, they were on-premises solutions deployed within an organization’s network infrastructure. Soon enough, several cloud-based DDoS protection solutions popped up.
On G2, the on-prem and cloud-based DDoS mitigation products were represented by DDoS Protection and Cloud DDoS Mitigation categories, respectively. However, at this juncture, we have decided to merge both categories into a single category called DDoS Protection.
This is mainly due to the fact that on-prem DDoS protection tools are almost non-existent at this point.
The handful of DDoS protection providers with on-prem offerings supply them as add-ons for their cloud-based solution. Therefore, merging both categories into a single category to represent the space seemed the most logical step to avoid redundancy.
Why on-premises DDoS protection solutions are a thing of the past
Like most cloud-based solutions, DDoS protection in the cloud format is more cost effective when compared to the high costs of maintaining and upgrading on-prem DDoS protection solutions. The pay-as-you-go model of cloud-based DDoS protection products eliminates the significant upfront investments of its on-prem counterparts.
“Fortunately, over the last two decades, the entire industry has adopted performance management solutions that dramatically improve performance and security overall, and DDoS attacks with bot mitigation tools in particular. As crucial as good health insurance and morning coffee, these cloud-based DDoS protection solutions enable us to take advantage of web-scale protection to deliver exceptional performance to our customers.”
Roger Valade
SVP Engineering, G2
Going cloud makes it easier to utilize machine learning (ML) for real-time traffic pattern analysis and performance analytics. The cloud advantage also shines bright when considering the scalability of these services.
More importantly, DDoS attacks have become more sophisticated. Such attacks typically involve multiple attack vectors, making it harder to detect and mitigate using on-prem tools. Cloud-based DDoS service providers continuously update their defense mechanisms, utilizing the latest threat intelligence feeds.
Exploring review data for G2's security categories
As of July 2024, the newly merged DDoS Protection Software category has 84 products with an average of approximately 10 reviews per product. Categories under the same parent category—Security Software—with related functionality have a higher number of reviews per product, as shown below.
The percentage breakdown of reviews by company segment for the same three categories has another story to tell.
DDoS protection products have the highest percentage of reviews from the enterprise segment when compared to the other categories. This is mainly due to the fact that most large organizations are more prone to DDoS attacks, and thus, they tend to invest heavily in DDoS protection.
While small and medium-sized businesses may become targets of DDoS attacks, the chances are lower when compared to larger companies. This is because malicious actors are usually in the trade for publicity or financial gains--something which is easier to gain by attacking larger organizations.
What lies ahead for DDoS protection
Security is becoming more proactive than reactive. DDoS protection solutions are advancing toward proactive, intelligent approaches that anticipate and counter threats before they cause service disruptions. The following are some developments to look out for in the DDoS protection space.
Artificial intelligence (AI)
It’s a common and excessively stated observation that AI will influence the inner workings of every software program written, similar to how electricity has impacted human civilization.
However, a notable amount of electricity, typically associated with renewable energy resources, is ironically generated using nonrenewable resources. Similarly, the question of whether AI is an energy-efficient and eco-friendly way to achieve the desired results will remain unanswered for a while.
Regardless, ML will play an increasingly crucial role in detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks. As ML models can continuously learn and adapt, they offer dynamic protection against new attack vectors and patterns.
Zero trust model
DDoS protection, as well as other security tools, will incorporate zero trust architecture (ZTA) to ensure that all traffic is continuously verified, significantly reducing instances of network infiltration.
ZTA helps implement microsegmentation—dividing a network into smaller sub-segments—allowing isolation of attacks and preventing widespread disruption.
Automated incident response
The adoption of automated incident response software can enable faster mitigation of DDoS attacks, ultimately reducing downtime and business disruption. This approach towards integrating different solutions with automation as the common denominator is a trend we can expect to see more of.
We have extensively discussed the rise of centralized data security management in which the data from different security solutions will be consolidated into a single AI-driven platform in one of G2's 2024 trends articles.
The evolving threat of DDoS
The merger of G2's DDoS Protection and Cloud DDoS Mitigation categories into a unified category reflects the industry's shift towards cloud-based solutions, driven by their cost-effectiveness, scalability, and advanced threat mitigation capabilities.
The evolution of DDoS attacks and the corresponding protective measures highlight the ongoing arms race between malicious actors and cybersecurity professionals. As this arms race intensifies, the cybersecurity landscape will continue to evolve, creating a need for more innovative approaches to safeguard digital infrastructures.
Are you worried about your aggravating shiny object syndrome when buying security products? Dr. Chase Cunningham has found a remedy for that, backed by the insights from G2 review data.
Edited by Jigmee Bhutia
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