DDoS protection gets sold as a single product more often than it should be. The reality is that attack surfaces differ significantly based on what kind of traffic a network actually carries, and mitigation that's tuned for one traffic profile can underperform, or even create new problems, when applied to a different one.
Residential traffic and enterprise traffic don't look the same under attack
A WISP serving residential subscribers typically sees traffic patterns dominated by streaming, browsing, and gaming, with predictable daily peaks and a relatively flat baseline otherwise. An enterprise or data center network often carries traffic with sharper, less predictable spikes tied to business activity, batch processes, or customer-facing application load.
Mitigation tuned to residential traffic patterns may flag legitimate enterprise traffic spikes as anomalous, triggering false positives that disrupt real business activity. Mitigation tuned to enterprise patterns may be too permissive for the volumetric attack types more common against residential ISP infrastructure, letting genuine attacks through longer than they should.
Attack types skew differently by sector
Volumetric attacks aimed at saturating bandwidth are a common threat against ISP and WISP infrastructure, where the goal is often disrupting service for a broad subscriber base. Application-layer attacks targeting specific services tend to be more common against enterprise and data center targets, where the goal is often disrupting a specific business function rather than an entire network.
A mitigation approach built primarily around volumetric defense will miss application-layer attacks. One built primarily around application-layer defense may not scale to handle the bandwidth saturation attacks more typical of ISP-scale infrastructure.
Generic thresholds create blind spots in both directions
DDoS mitigation that uses static, generic thresholds for what counts as anomalous traffic tends to underperform regardless of traffic type, because it isn't calibrated to either profile specifically. The fix isn't more aggressive thresholds across the board, since that increases false positives. It's mitigation that's actually built around the traffic profile of the network it's protecting.
What this means for evaluating DDoS protection
The right question when evaluating a DDoS solution isn't whether it works. Most solutions stop some volume of attacks. The right question is whether it's tuned to the specific traffic profile and attack surface of your network, not a generic baseline that happens to catch the most common attack types across all customers equally.
We build DDoS mitigation around the actual traffic profile of each network we protect, rather than applying a single configuration across every customer regardless of what their traffic actually looks like.