Here she comes, Amazon is going to bring fury to the DDoS Mitigation market, and turn it upside down. By default, since Akamai is one of the largest providers in the world of DDoS protection, they will feel first impact. Next to feel impact, hardware manufacturers of DDoS Mitigation equipment; Arbor Networks, F5 Networks, Radware, and so on. Thereafter, the DDoS Mitigation Pure-plays will be impacted; Neustar, Verisign, and so on. Finally, the security focused CDNs; CloudFlare, and so on. Incapsula is in the best position to counter the threat, since they make their own hardware, and they can go deep into the security portfolio of their parent company Imperva.
Let’s go through an interesting exercise here. We are going to put ourselves in Amazon’s shoes, in order to figure out their DDoS Mitigation strategy. The purpose of the exercise is to take “the element of surprise” away from Amazon. Amazon is going to roll out something soon; maybe Monday, next month, in three months, whatever. So when it happens, we can say told ya so . Sure, they can decide to become like Google, and just provide DDoS protection services at no charge, but that’s not Amazon’s MO. Amazon likes doing things “Grandiose Style”, making big entrances in whatever they do. This is what I believe Amazon will do in its roll out:
Amazon’s DDoS Mitigation Strategy
- Month 1:Â Go to market with 12 scrubbing centers
- Month 1: Total capacity will be 4 – 5 Tbps
- Month 1: Price will be at 50% below market rates
- Month 6: Roll out 6 more scrubbing centers for total of 18
- Month 6: Increase total capacity to 6-8Tbps
- Month 6: Price it 65% below market rates
- Month 12: Roll out 6 more scrubbing centers for a total of 24
- Month 12: Increase total capacity to 12Tbps
- Month 12: Price it below 80% below market rates
Amazon’s Grandiose Entrance To DDoS Mitigation
We can bank on Amazon making a Grandiose entrance into the DDoS Mitigation market, and their purpose in life is to destroy existing business models. They will unravel business models, as they did in the cloud compute and storage industry. Even if Amazon’s executive team deny they are taking such action, it would be foolish on our part to believe them, because they don’t even know how this will pan out long term. They can say one thing now, and later on change their mind once they get a better feel of it.
Takeaway: Prepare for Amazon’s Grandiose entrance, and don’t create competitive strategies on what they say, but where you believe they will be going with this long term. We have history to help us out here. Why the above roll out? Because if I was in their shoes, this is what I would do. In one shot, I could disrupt all DDoS Mitigation players including Akamai, CloudFlare, Arbor Networks, Radware, F5 Networks, Neustar, Verisign, Nexusguard, Level 3, CenturyLink, and so on. Good luck.