A leading communications service provider (CSP) in the Asia-Pacific region, faced an increasingly complex threat landscape as cyberattacks grew more sophisticated and frequent. To ensure uninterrupted service and maintain customer trust, it required robust DDoS mitigation that could deliver both precision and scalability.

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However, the competitive landscape posed a challenge. The market leader in DDoS mitigation had been a long-standing provider for the CSP, setting high expectations for accuracy and reliability. When Nexusguard entered the conversation, skepticism loomed. Could Nexusguard’s solutions not only match but surpass the performance of such an established player?

This case study explores how Nexusguard rose to the challenge, demonstrating unparalleled precision, seamless scalability, and a commitment to solving critical pain points for the CSP, ultimately redefining their expectations of DDoS protection.

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Challenges and Requirements‍

The CSP had relied on the market leader’s DDoS mitigation solution, which was primarily flow-based, for years. This solution was deeply integrated into the CSP’s infrastructure, setting a high bar for accuracy in detecting and mitigating threats. In comparison, SNMP-based methods, commonly used by network devices, provided a different lens for traffic analysis, and the CSP often used these metrics to validate the market leader’s results.

When Nexusguard proposed its solution, skepticism arose over whether it could deliver the same level of precision. The CSP’s team questioned Nexusguard’s ability to analyze and mitigate threats effectively, particularly in environments with traffic volumes exceeding 100 gigabits per second.

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Scalability added another layer of concern. The CSP’s rapid growth demanded a solution that could not only match the accuracy of the market leader but also scale seamlessly to handle increasing traffic loads without introducing latency or operational complexity.

Overcoming these concerns required Nexusguard to demonstrate superior performance and reliability, proving its capabilities against both flow-based benchmarks and SNMP-based validations.

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Nexusguard’s Innovative Solution

Nexusguard addressed the CSP’s concerns by demonstrating its advanced capabilities in two key areas: per-minute precision and traffic accuracy through advanced flow management techniques.

1. Per-Minute Precision

Nexusguard’s Bastions offer per-minute traffic analysis as a default feature, providing a significant advantage over the market leader’s solution, which would require the CSP to invest millions of dollars to unlock similar capabilities. This high-resolution monitoring enables more accurate detection and mitigation of DDoS attacks, as it captures traffic anomalies in near real-time, reducing the window for potential damage.

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2. Enhancing Traffic Accuracy through Advanced Flow Management

Nexusguard employs two innovative techniques - Flow Duration Normalizer and Flow Traffic Padding - to address common issues in network telemetry, such as inaccuracies in flow records, skewed metrics, and lost data due to packet size constraints.

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Benefits of Nexusguard’s Solution

Flow Duration Normalizer

Long-duration flows, particularly in TCP-based traffic, pose a significant challenge to traffic analysis. These flows can distort traffic metrics and create false positives in DDoS detection systems, as they disproportionately affect flow volume calculations. Nexusguard’s Flow Duration Normalizer applies an algorithm to limit the impact of these long-duration flows. This algorithm normalizes traffic spikes by smoothing out irregularities in flow behavior, ensuring that no single flow skews the overall analysis.

• Key Benefits: By normalizing flows, Nexusguard reduces the likelihood of false alerts and provides a more accurate representation of network behavior. This improves the quality of metrics used for threat detection and reporting.

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‍Flow Traffic Padding

Small-packet traffic, particularly UDP-based flows, often falls below the Ethernet minimum packet size of 64 bytes, leading to incomplete or skewed telemetry data. Nexusguard resolves this issue by padding small packets to meet the required size threshold. This ensures that small-packet traffic is accurately represented in flow records, eliminating inconsistencies that could compromise NetFlow analysis.

• Impact on UDP Traffic: Flow Traffic Padding is particularly effective in restoring accuracy for NetFlow-based UDP traffic, where high volumes of small packets can distort metrics and mislead analytics.

• Enhanced Consistency: By standardizing packet sizes, Nexusguard ensures that all traffic types - large and small - are accurately measured and analyzed.

Together, these techniques address critical flaws in traditional flow analysis methods, ensuring that Nexusguard provides the CSP with telemetry data that is both precise and actionable.

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By integrating these advanced flow management methods with real-time data processing and adaptive sampling techniques, Nexusguard delivers an unparalleled level of accuracy and reliability in traffic analysis, even during high-volume DDoS attacks.

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The Transformative Impact of Nexusguard’s Solution

The results of Nexusguard’s implementation surpassed the CSP’s expectations in both precision and scalability, addressing their initial skepticism and proving the efficacy of the solution.

• Precision Matched the Market Leader: Nexusguard’s per-minute traffic analysis demonstrated accuracy comparable to flow-based systems used by the incumbent. This precision provided the CSP with the confidence needed to rely on Nexusguard for detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks.

• Improved Scalability: Nexusguard’s cloud-native architecture effortlessly scaled to handle traffic volumes exceeding 100 gigabits per second, a critical requirement for the CSP’s rapidly growing infrastructure. Unlike the hardware-dependent solutions of the market leader, Nexusguard’s platform enabled seamless expansion without additional capital expenditure.

• Optimized Network Telemetry: By addressing flow gaps and latency issues in NetFlow data analysis, Nexusguard delivered improved telemetry accuracy. This provided the CSP with comprehensive visibility into network performance, facilitating faster response times and informed decision-making during high-volume attack scenarios.

• Cost-Effective Solution: With features like per-minute precision included as a standard offering, Nexusguard helped the CSP achieve superior performance without the need for significant financial investments, unlike the market leader’s high-cost premium features.

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Customer Quote

"We’ve used flow-based detection before, but the evolving nature of DDoS attacks requires more than generic solutions. Nexusguard’s deep focus on DDoS protection and understanding of ISP challenges gave us the precision and scalability we needed to safeguard our infrastructure and deliver uninterrupted service to  customers." — Operations Manager, Tier 1 CSP