5 Things to Consider When Choosing a Bot Management Solution

For organizations both large and small, securing the digital experience necessitates the need for a dedicated bot management solution. Regardless of the size of your organization, the escalating intensity of global bot traffic and the increasing severity of its overall impact mean that bot management solutions are crucial to ensuring business continuity and success.

The rise in malicious bot traffic, and more specifically, bots that mimic human-like behavior and require advanced machine learning to mitigate, require the ability to distinguish the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

We previously covered the basics in bot management evaluation, and urge you to likewise consider the following factors when choosing a solution.

Extensibility and Flexibility

True bot management goes beyond just the website. An enterprise-grade solution should protect all online assets, including your website, mobile apps and APIs. Protecting APIs and mobile apps is equally crucial, as is interoperability with systems belonging to your business partners and vital third-party APIs.

[You may also like: Key Considerations In Bot Management Evaluation]

Flexible Deployment Options

Bot mitigation solutions should be easy to deploy and operate with the existing infrastructure, such as CDNs and WAFs, as well as various technology stacks and application servers. Look for solutions that have a range of integration options, including web servers/CDNs/CMS plugins, SDKs for Java, PHP, .NET, Python, ColdFusion, Node.js, etc., as well as via JavaScript tags and virtual appliances.

A solution with non-intrusive API-based integration capability is key to ensuring minimal impact on your web assets.

[You may also like: Bots 101: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things]

Finally, any solution provider should ideally have multiple globally distributed points of presence to maximize system availability, minimize latency and overcome any internet congestion issues.

Is It a Fully Managed and Self-Reliant Service?

Webpage requests can number in the millions per minute for popular websites, and data processing for bot detection needs to be accomplished in real time. This makes manual intervention impossible — even adding suspected IP address ranges is useless in countering bots that cycle through vast numbers of addresses to evade detection. As a result, a key question that needs to be answered is does the solution require a specialized team to manage it, or does it operate autonomously after initial setup?

[You may also like: The Big, Bad Bot Problem]

Bot mitigation engines equipped with advanced technologies, such as machine learning, help with automating their management capabilities to significantly reduce the time and workforce needed to manage bots. Automated responses to threats and a system that does not require manual intervention considerably reduce the total cost of ownership.

Building vs. Buying

Large organizations have resources to develop their own in-house bot management solutions, but most companies do not have the time, resources or money to accomplish that. Building an adaptive and sophisticated bot mitigation solution, which can counter constantly evolving bots, can take years of specialized development.

Financially, it makes business sense to minimize capex and purchase cloud-based bot mitigation solutions on a subscription basis. This can help companies realize the value of bot management without making a large upfront investment.

[You may also like: Bot or Not? Distinguishing Between the Good, the Bad & the Ugly]

Data Security, Privacy and Compliance Factors

A solution should ensure that traffic does not leave a network — or, in case it does, data should be in an encrypted and hashed format to maximize privacy and compliance. Ensuring that the bot mitigation solution is compliant with the GDPR regulations pertaining to data at rest and data in transit will help avoid personal data breaches and the risk of financial and legal penalties