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Cloudflare DDoS Protection: Overview and Analysis

See our complete list of top DDoS vendors. Company Description Cloudflare’s network deals with more than 10 trillion requests per month, which is nearly 10 percent of all Internet requests for more than 2.5 billion people worldwide. Its approach is to protect and accelerate Internet applications online without adding hardware, installing software or changing […]

Written By

Drew Robb

Apr 3, 2018

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See our complete list of top DDoS vendors.

Company Description
Product Description
Markets and Use Cases
Metrics
Intelligence
Delivery
Agents
Pricing

Company Description

Cloudflare’s network deals with more than 10 trillion requests per month, which is nearly 10 percent of all Internet requests for more than 2.5 billion people worldwide. Its approach is to protect and accelerate Internet applications online without adding hardware, installing software or changing a line of code. Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Cloudflare has offices in Austin, Texas; Champaign, Ill.; Washington, D.C.; London; and Singapore. The seven-year-old company is privately held.

Product Description

Cloudflare has an always on, cloud-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection system. Instead of using dedicated anti-DDoS hardware, every single machine in its global network takes part in DDoS mitigation. With over 15 Tbps of capacity, it can scale up to handle the biggest DDoS attacks.

“As attackers have realized that the old volumetric L3/L4 attacks are being dealt with effectively, they’ve moved up the stack and are going after applications at the HTTP/HTTPS level directly (L7),” said John Graham-Cumming, CTO of Cloudflare. “This has led to the need to build new filtering systems.”

Markets and Use Cases

The company serves most verticals.

Metrics

The largest attack Cloudflare has seen was 600 Gbps, but it can handle 15 Tbps. Cloudflare mitigates a DDoS attack every three minutes. It sees an L3/L4 DDoS attack every six minutes, and an L7 DDoS attack every eight minutes. (An attack every six minutes is over 80,000 attacks in a year; every eight minutes is over 60,000 per year.)

Intelligence

Cloudflare’s DDoS solution is built around a system called Gatebot that automatically recognizes and mitigates DDoS attacks (both L3/L4 and L7). Its machine learning platform learns the behavior of IP addresses and bots, and it automatically filters bad traffic.

Delivery

Cloud

Agents

No agents used

Pricing

Free tier $0/month; Pro $20/month; Business $200/month. Enterprise pricing on request.

Drew Robb

Originally from Scotland, Drew Robb has been a writer for more than 25 years. He lives in Florida and specializes in IT, engineering, and business. As well as eWeek and TechRepublic, he writes for a wide range of magazines including Gas Turbine World, SDxCentral, and HR Magazine. He is the author of Server Disk Management in a Windows Environment (Auerbach Publications).