Akamai App & API Protector vs. NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection

Akamai Kona Site Defender KSD, works fine for any website or mobile application (Native/JDK), it can be used as a WAF, a rate limiting tool, or a bot management tool all in one, plus you will get all the benefits of the Akamai CDN (Content distribution network) as well

Incentivized

Arbor has the propensity to deal with even the larger firms. I have been using it for a year span and I don’t have any such complaint which is affecting us in a bad way. I can recommend this to all the companies who want to have a good network behavior analysis and to monitor the problems if there is any chance of it to occur and which has the potential to affect the whole working environment of the company.

Incentivized

• Web Security
• Bot managment
• Rate Control

Incentivized

• Arbor's layer 7 countermeasures are very good out of the box, but it is very easy to reconfigure values and see the impact in real-time.
• Peakflow SP provides fairly detailed traffic analysis and breakdown for top-N data such as top talkers, top ASNs, top ports and so on. They offer "SP Insight" as a product to build in more powerful reporting on the already-collected metrics with an interface very similar to Kibana or one of its many forks. We are not licensed for that so I can't speak to its capabilities.
• Arbor allows for a good amount of automation. Fast flood detection ensures that if pre-determined thresholds are quickly exceeded, preconfigured mitigations can be started or in the event of an extremely large volumetric attack you can trigger an Arbor Cloud (sold separately) mitigation or a remotely-triggered blackhole announcement to drop traffic to the attacked destination IP address(es) upstream.
• ATAC (Arbor support) is very helpful. The level of support our organization maintains covers ATAC performing all update functions to all Arbor appliances - SP and TMS.

Incentivized

• Custom rules might be hard to configure
• For some cases you will need to contact the Akamai team to adjust the backend
• Interface might feel laggy if used in a non-powerful PC

Incentivized

• Arbor is a highly expensive company. this was the major reason behind not going for the Arbor sightline in the first place. Although its features are good but the cost is unjustifiable.
• The implementation and the understanding of this tool are full of complexity and perplexity.
• I am looking forward to having a new update on it. They used to update their versions quite frequently but it's been a long time they haven’t updated or maybe it is not in their priority lists right now.

Incentivized

We evaluated Corero and a number of external scrubbing services. In the POC, we found Corero's mitigation capabilities to extremely limited beyond blocking common traffic types at preconfigured rates. It's not impossible to configure custom mitigation methods and countermeasures, but it requires a deep understanding of BPF and bytecode, where Arbor is checkboxes, radio buttons, and dialog buttons that all sit next to a graph showing traffic dropped and permitted by the current settings. I'm not going to enumerate each of the cloud services evaluated because the decision came down to the same reasoning. The amount of traffic we receive is enough that it would be prohibitively expensive for our use case.

Incentivized

• Fair Security investment
• An attack impact would be higher
• Support contract is not cheap

Incentivized

• Arbor is good in empower us to monitor the issues in the network.
• We can get better traffic analytics and reports are quite detailed.
• The price is quite high which makes it a little hard choice for us.

Incentivized