Top 10 Questions to Ask a Bot Management Provider – Source: securityboulevard.com

1. Is the bot management solution delivered as a service (is it a SaaS solution)?

Compared to software you have to manage yourself, SaaS solutions are designed to be a force multiplier for your team. Your solution should come with easy installation, a broad selection of integrations, onboarding assistance, and dedicated customer support teams to answer your questions and keep your protection up to date.

Avoid software-based bot protection that your team has to deploy, manage, scale, and troubleshoot—which quickly becomes a drain of resources, adding operational costs and extra complexity to your security stack. Software-based tools also tend to be based on legacy WAF technologies.

Peace of mind is essential for your team’s ability to focus on business-driving activities. Choose bot protection equipped with a specialized team you can trust to step in and keep your business and users safe during an attack.

2. Does the solution provide real-time, at-the-edge bot protection and analyze all requests every time?

When it comes to the online user experience, every millisecond counts. Your bot protection should be able to review every request at the edge, when the request is made, rather than reviewing requests later (after threats have already accessed your website, app, or API). For consistent, real-time availability, an enterprise-level solution should have a minimum of 20 points of presence (PoPs) spread across several different regions.

Another important capability is instant, AI-powered aggregate global detection, or a solution’s ability to immediately and continuously update its ML detection models based on the collective intelligence gathered from all protected endpoints worldwide. With instant aggregate global detection, a new threat signal detected on one customer endpoint is instantly shared across all customers and endpoints.

For an advanced bot and online fraud solution that processes trillions of signals per day, the value of collective intelligence cannot be overstated.

3. What is the false positive rate?

When a bot management vendor processes millions of requests (or more) every day, there is a chance that some human requests can be flagged mistakenly as bot requests. A smart goal is to preserve your user experience (UX) by ensuring that as few human users as possible get blocked or challenged with a CAPTCHA.

One key metric for detection accuracy is the false positive rate, which measures the percentage of actual human requests the detection system challenges as suspected bots. Effective bot management solutions strive to minimize their false positive rate, and provide you with transparency about what their percentage is.

Some bot management vendors suffer from false positive rates as high as 0.75%, which may not sound high, but is well above the ideal false positive rate of 0.01%. A higher false positive rate adds more friction to your UX. But dialing back a solution’s sensitivity allows sophisticated bots to evade detection. Inaccurate bot detection can also result in many negative consequences beyond a poor UX and security risks, such as increased fraud costs and reputational damage.

In addition to keeping the false positive rate low, advanced solutions will prioritize a feedback loop to constantly improve detection models based on accuracy and performance metrics like the false positive rate.

4. Is the solution easy to deploy on your architecture?

You don’t want to be forced to rely on the availability of your vendor’s professional services team to hit your project timelines. If bot protection takes days or weeks to onboard and requires custom integrations or complex deployments, your business will be exposed to fraudsters for longer.

Your solution should offer easy and quick server-side integrations (Cloudflare, Apache, Nginx, etc.), client-side integrations (JavaScript tag, SDK documentation for Android and iOS), integration with your CDN (CloudFront, Akamai, etc.), and third-party integrations (logs, apps, and SIEM/SOC). All integrations must have the ability to detect and block malicious traffic.

Easy integration is crucial. It provides flexibility and agility for your organization, which in turn allows your team to save time, streamline processes, and avoid getting trapped in a limited compatibility environment.

5. Are the dashboards and user interface easy to navigate?

Being able to get real-time threat information and see the protection you need fast is critical. Avoid sifting through several reports and pages—or sitting through weeks of software training—to get the information you need.

You should have easy access to a real-time view of all your incoming requests and web traffic, including the threats attacking your websites, apps, and APIs at a glance, as well as through more detailed views. Enterprises say they are prioritizing mobile app and API bot protection, because the security of your online ecosystem is only as strong as its weakest link. Every endpoint must be fully secured with real-time bot protection, and that must be visible in its dashboards and user interface.

Look for a solution’s ability to examine specific events, quickly drill into relevant information, and view your traffic by attack type, user, account, trend, and other views that help reveal patterns and useful insights. You may also want to inquire about a mobile app companion to see attack alerts and explore traffic information on the go.