We’re in the 3rd generation of DDoS Mitigation Services. The first gen DDoS Mitigation Services were defined by providers like Neustar, Prolexic and Verisign. Next, CDNs entered the landscape and were forced to offer DDoS Mitigation Services, due to the fact that it was their customers being attacked. Thereafter, another crop of innovators popped up offering more than just standard DDoS protection against Layer 3/4/7 attacks; they offer features like advance bot mitigation, digital fingerprinting, click fraud prevention, credit card fraud prevention, anti-scrapers, continuous malware scanning, and protection against unknown vulnerabilities.
What’s different in this case is that one generation doesn’t necessarily replace another generation, in that some customers are using providers from all three generations. For example, many of Distil Networks customers are Akamai customers, and some of those exact same customers are using traditional DDoS Mitigation Service Providers. Another interesting development is that traditional security appliance manufacturers such as F5 Networks and Radware have entered the DDoS Mitigation space via scrubbing centers. The scrubbing center is the infrastructure piece that turns one company from a Network Security Provider into a DDoS Mitigation Services Provider.
