Research into Network-Based DDoS Mitigation Service Shows Significant Financial Benefits for Enterprise Customers

Results of a recently commissioned Total Economic Impact (TEI) study that Forrester Consulting conducted on behalf of CenturyLink show significant financial benefits for companies that use CenturyLink’s network-based DDoS mitigation service.

The purpose of the “TEI of CenturyLink DDoS Mitigation Service” study was to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying the service. Results of the study include:

• ROI of 222% over three years, and recovery of initial investment in less than six months.
• Total present-value benefit of $1.6 million over three years.
• Seventy-five percent reduction in mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR).
• Twenty percent decrease in suspicious activity, and 25% decrease in attempted intrusions on average.
• Near elimination of outages due to DDoS attacks, and decommissioning of legacy DDoS products, which combine for up to $0.4 million in benefit.

The study also revealed that customers who use CenturyLink to prevent DDoS attacks avoid a litany of other costs – including legal fees, public relations activities, end-customer support services, end-customer credits, and regulatory compliance costs – which can often be many multiples of the actual lost revenue.

“CenturyLink is in a unique position to use our network as the first layer of defense because we own and operate one of the largest IP backbones on the planet,” said Christopher Smith, CenturyLink’s vice president of global security services. “We deploy 85+ Tbps of BGP FlowSpec-initiated mitigation defenses to drop bad traffic at the network edge, and then our sophisticated, multi-terabit scrubbing infrastructure remediates even the most advanced attacks. This preemptive protection stops attacks before they happen and delivers more clean traffic to our customers’ doors. This, in turn, helps relieve some of the pressure their teams feel to quickly detect and respond to malicious activity.”

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According to Forrester’s 2019 Global Security Survey, DDoS attacks accounted for 24% of all external security attacks in 2019. Because much of CenturyLink’s DDoS mitigation service is automated, most of the cost savings that customers experience – up to $1.2 million – comes from the ability to optimize their network security teams to focus on other priorities. This helps break the “resource vortex” that many companies experience when their highly skilled security analysts spend hours detecting and resolving threats rather than focusing on developing new security strategies against future threats.

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Forrester provides insights into the cybersecurity staffing shortage¹: “A cybersecurity staffing shortage is the industry’s accepted truth…. Projections indicate a shortfall of at least 2.2 million candidates…. Security automation and orchestration (SAO) solutions orchestrate security processes and automate activities, allowing teams to work faster and more accurately.”

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