Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are contractual terms that companies use to stand behind the services they deliver. In cloud-based security services, they typically come in the form of uptime, time of response, or time to resolution and are tied to the operational practices of the businesses providing the SLAs. SLAs are an important consideration when working with any service provider as they give you a baseline for what you should expect from the company that you are working with and what their level of maturity is in providing the service.    

Vercara’s UltraDDoS Protect service has offered industry leading SLAs since the service was launched, and over time, we have continued to improve upon those SLAs as we improve the service with new techniques and capabilities. I’m thrilled to share that we are now adding and improving the SLAs we offer once again. Our industry leading 99.9998% service uptime and 99.99% portal uptime SLAs remain in place, as do our SLAs regarding customer service response and instantaneous notification when detecting an attack using our Detection and Alerting service.  We just added a powerful new SLA around time to start mitigations which uses our always-on defenses at our network edge and our auto-mitigation capabilities. We have also adjusted the mitigation effectiveness SLA to enhance its effect. These two SLAs alone are hugely impactful because they reflect how quickly we’ll respond to attacks and how fast we expect mitigations to be effective. We also added new SLAs around standard provisioning time, standard time to make configuration changes, emergency provisioning time, and emergency change times.

This article will describe each of these new SLAs and why they matter to our customers. 

Mitigation start. 

Aside from uptime of the platform, Mitigation Start is the most sought-after SLA as it defines how quickly a mitigation will begin when you are attacked. We offer a 0 second SLA for edge mitigations, a 30 second SLA for auto-mitigations, and a 15-minute SLA for manual mitigations. Thanks to our expansive knowledge of attacks and the way that we have architected our network, we block many common attacks at our network edge instantaneously as we see the traffic on our network and are able to reflect that in our 0 second SLA.  Most of the attacks that cannot be blocked at the network edge, because they require more nuanced mitigation techniques can be auto-mitigated, where detection to mitigation can be done in under 30 seconds.  For the small remainder of attacks that are not blocked by our auto-defenses, our SOC can mitigate these manually in under 15 minutes from time of detection or customer notification of the attack. 

Mitigation effectiveness. 

Vercara has been mitigating DDoS attacks for over a decade, and because of this, our SOC has hands-on experience with all types of attack techniques.  Our mitigation effectiveness SLA puts our money where our mouth is by measuring how quickly we get the attack under control.  Mitigations are often immediately effective when they start because of the custom default settings we apply to each of our customers. However, some attacks can be more complex, or attackers can vary attack techniques in a way that requires our SOC has to step in to fine- tune the mitigation.  Any DDoS mitigation provider that claims to block all attacks without tuning is not being truthful. The mitigation effectiveness SLA outlines a maximum time that we expect to take to ensure a mitigation is blocking enough attack traffic to restore your service to full operation. 

Standard provisioning and standard change. 

Once you purchase a DDoS service, you want to make sure you are protected as soon as possible.   These SLAs reflect that we will complete initial configuration or subsequent changes to your configuration in less than 72 hours. Typically it will take us much less than this. This ensures that you can be onboarded and protected quickly, and that we will adapt when the configuration of your network changes.   

Emergency provisioning and emergency changes. 

DDoS attacks can catch you by surprise and will sometimes affect companies that do not have a service in place or may impact resources or infrastructure that you hadn’t previously configured.  For these situations, we offer emergency provisioning and configuration where we will immediately work with you and get your attacked resources provisioned in under 4 hours. Note that for BGP deployments, it requires registration of the route announcement with RADB and that process may take longer than 4 hours. We will work with you to shorten this as much as possible. 

Available now. 

These new SLAs are available in all new Service Orders for the UltraDDoS Protect service.  You can get them applied to your account by updating your service contract to the latest version. 

We’re proud of the SLAs that we provide for the DDoS service but recognize that meeting SLAs is just the first step in providing a premium mitigation service. Our goal is to provide our customers with optimal protection, as quickly as possible, at all times, regardless of the attacks they face.  We constantly innovate on our platform and in our processes to improve response time, flexibility, auto-mitigation options, and mitigation techniques to stay multiple steps ahead of the attackers.  

To learn more about how Vercara’s solutions can quickly mitigate a wide variety of attacks and secure your online experience, visit our solutions overview page.