In today's evolving cybersecurity landscape, traditional on-premises WAF solutions and legacy DDoS defences remain critical for certain regulatory compliance scenarios, sensitive data protection, and internal applications where data locality is paramount. However, as organisations accelerate their digital transformation and cloud adoption, relying solely on these traditional approaches leaves substantial gaps that modern threats readily exploit.
While Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are not a new threat, its evolution has outpaced many organisations’ defences, and traditional approaches to DDoS protection are no longer enough. They don’t just fall short; they create blind spots that attackers exploit, often resulting in downtime, losing revenue, and damaged trust.
DDoS attacks have become more sophisticated, targeted and damaging. What were once high-volume Layer 3 and Layer 4 floods, such as SYN floods and DNS amplification, are now often combined with sophisticated Layer 7 attacks (application-layer) attacks that mimic legitimate user behaviour.
As organisations increase reliance on cloud services, APIs, and remote access, the attack surface expands. At the same time, attackers are becoming sophisticated, using automation, artificial intelligence, and globally distributed botnets to launch high-impact attacks with minimal effort.
The cost of inaction is high. An industry report estimates that DDoS-related downtime can exceed $40,000 per hour, and even a one-second delay in web performance can reduce conversion rates by up to 7%.
Strengthening on-prem security: Combating sophisticated DDoS attacks
To keep pace with today's threat landscape, a cloud-based DDoS mitigation platform complements existing on-premises defences by addressing these vulnerabilities and providing an additional robust, cloud-native security layer. It excels particularly in handling sophisticated Layer 7 (application-layer) attacks that mimic legitimate user behaviour—attacks that traditional DDoS solutions struggle to detect effectively. By leveraging machine learning, behavioural analytics, and globally distributed infrastructure, these solutions provide scalable, automated, and globally distributed protection tailored for the modern enterprise.
- Scalable protection, reduced CAPEX
Cloud-based platforms utilise a globally distributed infrastructure to absorb large-scale attacks without requiring upfront investments in hardware. Resources scale elastically, matching the intensity of an attack in real time, often within sub-second timeframes, meeting modern demands for high availability and uninterrupted user experience. It also provides comprehensive protection across websites, DNS systems, networks, individual IP addresses, and cloud-hosted assets, regardless of subnet ownership.
- Real-time automated response
Advanced scrubbing centres detect and neutralise threats within milliseconds. These systems automatically distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic, thereby reducing false positives while maintaining a seamless user experience. This helps teams focus on real threats, particularly during complex multi-vector attacks where a DDoS campaign may be used to distract from credential theft or malware injection.
Real-world impact
Imperva has helped organisations around the world defend against some of the largest and most persistent DDoS campaigns ever recorded.
In one instance, a global enterprise was targeted by a multi-vector DDoS attack that exceeded 500 million packets per second, peaking at 713 Gbps. The platform automatically mitigated the attack without requiring human intervention or service disruption, utilising the TTS Software-Defined Network Operations Centre (SD-NOC) to redirect malicious traffic to the most suitable scrubbing centres.
In another instance, an enterprise faced a 13-day attack involving over 400,000 IPs and peaking at 292,000 requests per second. Imperva successfully blocked all threats while also identifying a broader malware injection campaign targeting IoT devices. The platform not only defends against traffic surge but also uncovers the broader compromise and prevents further escalation.
Achieving comprehensive security and agility with Imperva
Beyond DDoS mitigation, Imperva Cloud WAF provides advanced bot protection, critical for combating credential stuffing and account takeover (ATO) attacks. Its integrated intelligence and proactive response mechanisms identify malicious bots and threats instantly, significantly reducing false positives and ensuring legitimate traffic remains uninterrupted. Moreover, extends visibility and security into hybrid environments, APIs, SaaS workloads, and remote access scenarios—areas typically blind-spotted by legacy solutions. The platform also enables enhanced agility and cost-efficiency by transitioning away from fixed-capacity hardware models toward scalable, as-a-service infrastructure.
By integrating Imperva Cloud WAF with existing on-premises security investments, enterprises achieve comprehensive, multilayered protection. This strategic coexistence strengthens resilience, improves threat detection capabilities, and ensures a seamless, secure user experience across all digital assets, regardless of their location.
