We had some internal stuff previously. For solutions that we purchased, this was the first.

We have had the solution since the beginning. We have used it as our own mitigation and detection.

We were previously using the Arbor APS platform. Some of the reasons we switched were that the TMS platform we were looking at didn't have the functionality to do ECMP and BGP the way we wanted to be able to do them. The second major factor was pricing. Pricing was much higher with Arbor for the same type of solution.

We had a script built in-house. We decided to replace some of our own programming with a proper appliance.

What we signed off on when we signed the contract with them was very specifically DDoS mitigation. We went over all the specs of what we intended the system to do. They met all the specs better than the other vendors as far as the throughput, the footprint, and cost went. So we went with them.

The main reason we switched was cost. The cloud solutions were very expensive and, as we sent more traffic, of course, the prices went up. And it was a huge variable. We couldn't budget saying, "We're going to spend X amount of dollars per month on DDoS," because it all depended upon how much traffic we sent to those mitigation servers. If we got attacked one month a couple of hundred times, our expense there could have been tens of thousands of dollars a month. We were not willing to play that game and have that much variability in our expense. By putting this system in, it's our system, so we use it as much as we need to, and we don't pay a monthly expense. We pay A10 for support and that's it.

There was also a difference in response time between A10 and the cloud solutions because now we completely control the solution. Whereas, when we were outsourcing it, we didn't control any of it. So we would send traffic and hope that their mitigation system wasn't overtaxed. Their detection system, sometimes, could also be a little overtaxed and delayed, because there was the internet. We were sending traffic, sending our stats, across the net to their detection system. Their detection system would analyze that traffic, send a response back, and then mitigate if it had to. We had to send that traffic back out onto the public internet. So there was a lot of delay and a lot of variability in the response times. Now it's completely on our network and we control everything about it. So we get much faster response time in mitigation and detection.

We did not have a previous solution.