With excerpts by LightRiver Partner, Corero
Did you know that Service Providers (SPs) across both commercial and residential markets face significant challenges and competition? Of these challenges, perhaps one of the most important, is how to balance the costs involved with protecting critical infrastructure from cyber-attacks that have the potential to paralyze their service, alongside growing their business.
In this blog, let’s take a further look at how SPs can effectively turn these costs into generating new revenue streams, and how to retain and gain customers through offering DDoS protection as-a-service.
Achieving and holding onto customer loyalty is key for any business in today’s ever-changing world, Keeping customers happy is priceless given the cost of keeping an existing customer is significantly less than acquiring a new one. But, in the recent business climate, several providers are discovering that customer acquisition costs (CAC) are rising, while the lifetime customer value of said customers (LTV) are falling rapidly. Considering this, what can SPs do to incentivize customers to stay loyal?
Considering our increasingly interconnected world we live in, the fastest connections and IoT device adoption is more relevant and important than ever. . And SPs are therefore highly focused on maintaining service uptime and ensuring SLAs. They are also focused on the fact that , one of the biggest; if not THE biggest, threats to uptime is Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and offering DDoS protection ‘as a service’ is absolutely essential at this point.
The Value of Attack Visibility and Insights
According to LightRiver DDoS partner, Corero, while many organizations regard DDoS security as a cost center; SPs are favorite targets for threat actors and they know it is essential to protect their infrastructure since their tenant customers rely on them to be fully functional. Many providers therefore are taking the extra step of offering DDoS protection as a service, so customers can gain visibility and insight into DDoS attack traffic affecting their network and access actionable intelligence. Knowing what types of DDoS attacks that have been mitigated is not just a ‘nice to have’ – it makes good business sense to have the intelligence to be able to adjust DDoS mitigation rules that can block future attacks. It is also critical for your security team to be immediately able to see if any network issue is due to a DDoS attack, or whether it is in fact due to some other network issues. Having this visibility into attacks saves valuable time and ‘man hours’.
What About ROI?
As we mentioned earlier, gaining and retaining customers is key. Offering DDoS protection as a service to tenant customers is not just a revenue generator, but a competitive differentiator, because few providers can guarantee robust DDoS protection to their customers. Some SPs offer protection for free, as a value-add service, while some choose to generate incremental revenue by offering protection as a subscription service. Others may offer baseline DDoS mitigation services to all customers, but for those customers who place a premium on high service availability, the provider can create value-added options. Whether they offer DDoS protection service for free or for a fee, SPs gain and retain more customers.
Ensuring Ultimate Protection
With today’s highly sophisticated nature of DDoS attacks, SPs require precise enforcement of mitigation policies against DDoS attack traffic, accomplished only with line-rate performance and maximum-security efficacy. Legacy out-of-band, on-demand DDoS scrubbing centers and cloud services are prone to creating unacceptable delays between the start of an attack and when the actual remediation efforts begin. The legacy approach is also typically resource-intensive and expensive for providers due to the need of highly trained personnel monitoring r traffic 24/7. The fact that human security analysts can’t react fast enough to modern multi-vector DDoS attacks that are typically short in duration, small in volume and hard to distinguish from legitimate traffic, this is highly error prone.
In contrast, real-time, automatic DDoS mitigation technology enables DDoS protection at full edge bandwidth, scaling to tens-of-terabits per second of protected capacity, where previously only partial scrubbing capacity was feasible. It eliminates the requirement to manually analyze events and removes the need to reroute traffic, both good and bad, in order to surgically remove the DDoS packets, before returning it to the network. With this the detection-to-mitigation-to-protection timeline shrinks to seconds, or even sub-second.
With a DDoS Protection as a service model, providers can easily deliver real-time DDoS protection as a premium security service to their customers. It can be offered as a value-add service, or they can monetize their DDoS protection by offering tiered levels of protection to tenants.
In today’s competitive Service Provider market, DDoS protection as a service is a smart, effective way for ISPs to add value to their existing services and prevent customer churn.
Read the full blog at https://www.corero.com/how-to-identify-revenue-expansion-opportunities-with-managed-ddos-protection/.
