By Gaurav Mohan, VP Sales, SAARC & Middle East, NETSCOUT
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks continue to torment organizations of all sizes and types as these types of attacks continue to increase in both frequency and complexity. A DDoS attack can be defined simply as an attempt to drain the resources of a network, application, or service so that legitimate users cannot access it. According to the NETSCOUT 1H2025 Threat Intelligence Report, over 8 million attacks were recorded worldwide in just the first half of 2025. Threat actors are now using AI, botnets, and DDoS-for-hire services to launch more sophisticated and prolonged campaigns. In India, too, the DDoS threat landscape is constantly evolving, with many organizations—particularly large enterprises and service providers—being targets of these attacks.
DDoS attacks are disruptive and painful
Unplanned downtime, service and application unavailability, and inability to conduct business as usual, has painful consequences including:
Loss of Revenue – customers cannot buy your goods or services.
Reduce Profitability – you have to spend money to remediate and recover.
Low Productivity – unable to access key applications and services, employees can’t do their jobs well or at all.
Customer Churn – with frustration from not being able to place orders for products or services, and low switching costs coupled with competition, customers switch to competitors, and they may never return.
Reputational Risks – downtime and unavailability for any reason hurts your brand and erodes your customers faith in the organization’s ability to provide reliable services.
Legal Consequences – if you have service level agreements that do not get met, or fail to meet a regulatory standard, affected parties may file lawsuits, and government agencies can impose fines and penalties on the organization.
Limitations of Generic DDoS Solutions
Generic, or non-dedicated DDoS protection solutions can and will fall short of stopping damaging DDoS attacks if they are not tailored to the unique requirements and scale of the network. Without customization, they leave visibility gaps in the network, providing opportunity for adversaries. They avoid detection while waiting for the right moment to strike. Furthermore, attack detection capabilities may not be as reliable with generic solutions. When detection thresholds are set too high, smaller and more targeted attacks avoid detection, leading to increased downtime and disruption in operations. Large-scale attacks such as volumetric DDoS attacks can overwhelm generic defenses. Once compromised, these defenses become ineffective, allowing adversaries to carry out successful attacks.
Dedicated DDoS Mitigation Solutions and Their Key Benefits
Implementing a dedicated and customized DDoS mitigation solution offers critical business advantages to reduce risk and mitigate damage from attacks. Key benefits include:
Minimized business disruption
Dedicated DDoS protection brings about minimal business disruption, reducing unplanned downtime and maintaining high productivity by rapid detection and mitigation of attacks. This prevents lost sales and opportunity costs due to service outages.
Cost-effective risk management
By avoiding costly false positives or negatives, organizations can balance security investment and business impact. This management of risk, which is cost-effective, also extends the lifespan of existing infrastructure, such as firewalls, by protecting firewalls so they can accomplish what they were designed to achieve.
Enhanced customer experience
Maintaining the availability and performance of services without adding friction and avoiding over-blocking to ensure legitimate traffic flows freely helps in enhancing customer and user experience.
Comprehensive protection
Protecting critical assets, such as cloud or on-premises infrastructure, DNS, firewalls, and web applications, ensures comprehensive coverage and protection.
Advanced threat detection
Leveraging artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to adapt to evolving attacks and detect novel threats is key. Dedicated DDoS protection solutions can offer bidirectional inspection to block both inbound and outbound malicious traffic, providing advanced threat detection capabilities.
Scalability and flexibility
Combining cloud for volumetric attack mitigation and on-premises for application-layer attacks in tandem provides a hybrid strategy for mitigating attacks of all types and sizes, providing both scalability and flexibility.
Integration and intelligence: Leveraging curated threat intelligence feeds can help automate the detection of millions of indicators of compromise.
Unified management: Some dedicated DDoS protection solutions offer centralized control capabilities for visibility across diverse network environments.
Today’s DDoS attacks are dynamic, use multiple vectors, and leverage evolving AI techniques to evade DDoS defenses, potentially leading to catastrophic consequences for the organization’s services, reputation, and revenue. Dedicated and adaptive DDoS protection solutions with an added layer of AI automated protection backed by threat intelligence, defend both cloud and on-premises, ensuring organizations are ready for everything from “slow and low” multi-vector to large-scale volumetric attacks.