Level 3 has done a decent job offering network based security for the last several years. At one time, they resold Prolexic DDoS Mitigation Services to its large customer base. However, with Akamai acquiring Prolexic, that relationship is certain to fizzle over time if it hasn’t already. We understand it’s in Akamai’s best interest to kick Level 3 off the Prolexic platform, since they are fierce competitor’s in the CDN space, especially in the Media & Entertainment segment. Regardless, even without Prolexic in the fold, Level 3 still offers some basic Layer 3/4 network protection services.
Level 3 joins the dozens of companies already offering DDoS Mitigation services including Neustar, Verisign, Akamai, EdgeCast, CloudFlare, Incapsula, and so on. Level 3 is in a unique position because it is a Carrier first, Data Center company second, CDN third, and Vyvx fourth. If we were to illustrate where Level 3 sits in relation to the host of other providers it would go something like this:
DDoS Mitigation Service Providers
- Tier 1: Akamai, EdgeCast, Incapsula, CloudFlare, Sitelock, Zenedge, Distil Networks, Fireblade and Azure CDN – offer fully integration DDoS Mitigation Services along with CDN and other services such as WAF
- Tier 2: Neustar, Verisign, F5 Networks and Radware: Offer standard DDoS Mitigation services without the bells and whistles of the Tier 1
- Tier 3: Level 3 offers basic DDoS Mitigations Services at Layer 3/4
Amazon is Missing in Action
It’s hard to believe that Amazon has a strong story in compute, storage and CDN, however, when it comes to DDoS Mitigation, they have no story as of yet. Amazon has massive resources at its disposal, so its hard to deduce why they have nothing in place now. It can’t be that hard to build a DDoS Mitigation platform. Last year at re:Invent 2013 Amazon created a slideshare preso called “DDoS Resilience with Amazon Web Services”.
The deck is 123 slides long, and talks about DDoS Anatomy, Scale, Diversity, Resilience, Shuffle Sharding, Detect Response and Blacklisting. However, there was no mention of scrubbing centers, SecOps, proactive monitoring, mitigation, and so on. Second, the presentation looks like Amazon pulled someone from the compute side of house to write this presentation. Third, never, ever, create a preso that is 123 slides, as that’s whats called death by Power Point.