One of the Largest ISPs in the US Assists Customers With DDoS Protection Through Patrolling the Network Edge

The Challenge

This ISP was focused on protecting their network and transit links by positioning DDoS protection at the traditional peering centers located at the network edge. Over the past several years, peering traffic has been slowly migrating away from traditional peering locations and closer to the customer. While this transition has brought an improved customer experience through high-speed low latency access to Cloud based services and OTT content, it has also brought with it an increasing amount of DDoS traffic. To remain fully protected against DDoS threats, this customer needed to expand their intelligent DDoS coverage to this expanded network edge.

The Solution

As the organization started looking for a solution that would provide DDoS coverage to the edge, they looked to NETSCOUT® due to a previous trusted relationship and because Sightline With Sentinel and our Sightline-to-Sightline signaling capability aligned with their strategy of network protection through orchestration and collaboration.

Initially funds were limited due to the onset of the pandemic, so they did not think they could move forward right away. Unfortunately, for them, hackers don’t really care about budget downturns so they continued on with their attacks which prompted the organization to step back and reassess the timeline to put something in place to protect their customers.

A well-publicized attack provided the impetus for them to reach out to NETSCOUT to discuss deploying to the edge of the network. Although there was competition during the RFP process, NETSCOUT was selected as the preferred vendor because we had a better presentation of how to protect the edge of the network and we had a trusted relationship with the organization.

Once we earned access to executive conversations, the value proposition we presented was to move NETSCOUT to a profit center and avoid the role of a cost center, IT burden or other necessary evil, but keep their service available plus their customers happy.

We proposed a solution that leveraged their current DDoS investment plus positioned that investment in the right places on the network, out at the edge, while also removing some of the burden and cost of running the network. We then presented an additional path forward to add services that would protect their customers, networks and serve as a revenue-generation opportunity that they could realize going forward.

The solution was all about having enterprise level DDoS services they could offer their customers because customers are looking for more services that are available in the cloud, and for this organization’s customers, they are the cloud.

The Results

Since the implementation of the recommended solution, the organization has seen a decrease in DDoS attacks at the edge of their network so are starting to realize the opportunity for revenue generation through protection services to their customers.

Overarching Benefit

Through recommendations to position scrubbing centers at the edge of their network, where most of the growth in cloud-streaming services and OTT content delivery services operated, NETSCOUT provided the ability for the ISP to generate revenue while protecting their customer’s network availability.