Distributed denial-of-service attacks are becoming more serious and sophisticated. Attack motivations are increasingly financial or political. Roughly half of all attacks last a day or more, and their costs are estimated to be $2.1 million for every four hours of downtime. Attacks are made at all network layers, and network firewalls by themselves are inadequate to mitigate the attacks.

F5 leverages its unique point of control to deliver a comprehensive DDoS mitigation solution. It starts with a complete contextual understanding of all traffic flowing through the device to make intelligent traffic management decisions. It then applies that context to a two-tier (L3-4 and L7) model that encompasses multilayer protection for Domain Name System, network, SSL, and applications. F5 uses a common hardware and software framework to deliver these services. This simplifies the configuration and management of network resources without any hardware restrictions.

ACG Research analyzed the total cost of ownership of a DDoS mitigation use case for a large enterprise. The TCO of the F5 consolidated solution was compared to the TCO of a solution using multiple point products offered by leading DDoS mitigation vendors. It found that the F5 solution has 81 percent lower TCO over five years. Capital expense is 80 percent lower and operations expense is 82 percent lower. Consolidation of all DDoS functions in a two-platform solution eliminates replication of i/o ports (back-to-back) and common costs, such as power supplies, backplanes, and software operating systems. In addition, F5’s use of a single management interface eliminates a great deal of the complexity involved in using multiple management interfaces for the alternative point products solution.

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