When a volumetric attack hits, the first question is rarely "which scrubber" — it is whether your transit paths can absorb or shed the traffic without collapsing everything else on the same circuit. Operators who buy mitigation without reviewing how traffic enters and leaves their AS often discover gaps the hard way.
A sound edge strategy pairs geographically diverse upstreams with BGP communities or redirect policies your carriers actually honour. Capcon maps those relationships during onboarding so mitigation is not a bolt-on that fights your routing design.
Smaller ISPs and enterprises sometimes assume a single Tier 1 upstream is "enough" because the brand implies scale. In practice, single-homed paths are the hardest to defend surgically; you either black-hole prefixes or absorb the full blast. Redundant paths give you negotiation room with carriers and time to engage scrubbing without total outage.
Treat DDoS readiness as a routing exercise first and a product purchase second. The checklist is boring but effective: multiple transit providers, documented failover, tested null-route procedures, and a partner who can escalate with carriers when you are under fire.