Challenges of Building In-house Bot Protection

Building an in-house bot protection software that can keep up with sophisticated bot attacks requires a huge amount of resources your company may not want to spend. Keeping up with bad bots involves: scalability, limited data, research, resources, maintenance, and time.

Scalability & Adaptability

Bots come in droves of thousands or even more, making millions upon millions of requests to your website. Is your in-house tool ready to handle that level of traffic on a regular basis? Can it scale as your company grows, and adapt to sales events like Black Friday that can lead to 30x higher traffic than normal?

If you build an in-house bot protection tool, ensure it is scalable and adaptable no matter the circumstances. Understand that this will put extra strain on your IT infrastructure and resources. Cloud resources (computing, networking, storage, security, etc.) are a recurring operations cost, as well as SRE and Ops teams.

Limited Data

An effective bot detection model requires a lot of data to train the algorithms—data you may not have access to. When you develop an in-house bot tool, you will only have insights into the bot threats you are faced with. New threats that are attacking your competitors or other industries will be invisible until they reach you and wreak havoc.

Continuous Research

To know how to stop the latest bots, you will need to invest in research continually, looking for the newest threats and ways bots have learned to circumvent security features you might be using. This research can involve infiltrating bot developer communities along with several hours of looking into bot attacks on your own business. And then, once you’ve sufficiently researched a new threat or way bots are bypassing security, you will need to figure out how to stop it, then implement that solution into your software.

Rinse and repeat this process every day, potentially multiple times a day.

Intensive Resource Allocation

An in-house bot protection tool has intensive resource needs all dedicated to the company rather than spread out across customers: talent, time, and infrastructure. Businesses would need to hire developers and engineers to build and implement the tool, researchers to stop new attacks, and probably a few on-call personnel to respond to larger bot attacks. How many hours would be needed to get the tool running? How many to keep it going despite the continual improvement of bad bots?

Lastly, your technology infrastructure needs to be able to handle bot traffic and human traffic, as well as your tool, without adding unnecessary friction in the UX or increasing loading times. Consider where your business’ traffic is coming from as well. Do you have a steady stream of international traffic? Businesses with internet presence around the world need to invest in global infrastructure to be able to react quickly without impacting UX.

Maintenance & Regular Updates

In line with your research, you will need to continually maintain your bot protection software with regular updates and checks to ensure you’re stopping the bots you want to. Threats are always evolving, so your tool should be too.

Despite your efforts, your team can only be so large compared to the size of your company. And if your focus is on actually running your business, you won’t be able to keep up with bot evolution. Most organizations will only be able to build a very basic, low-protection solution—likely costing more money and time than paying for sophisticated protection would.

Time to Value

Consider the time to value (TTV) of a solution you build in-house. When you start considering the need for a bot protection tool, you’re already feeling pain somewhere in your business. How long will it take to build your tool from scratch? How much damage could an attacker do in the meantime?

Advantages of Buying a Bot Protection Solution

Buying a ready-made bot protection solution from a reputable vendor has more benefits than detriments—and will often save you money every month. The advantages of buying your bot detection include: expertise and specialization in the field, shared intelligence, continuous improvements without internal effort, scalability, comprehensive analytics, and cost-effectiveness.

Expertise & Specialization in Bot Detection

A bot detection software vendor is comprised of experts in that field, specializing in mitigating the kind of bots businesses are struggling with. They will have threat researchers, engineers, developers, and on-call response personnel in-house, all of whom are focused on keeping your business safe from malicious bots and online fraud.

As far as TTV goes, you can often deploy protection in hours, stopping bots before they become too painful for your business. No need to scramble to build or update your in-house tool.

Shared Intelligence

A bot detection software vendor can gather threat data from every single customer they protect, so new threats are added to the detection model for everyone immediately. This also means that the detection algorithms benefit from massive troves of training data, which results in a stronger, smarter model overall.

Continuous Improvements Without Internal R&D Overhead

Security vendors are fully aware of how quickly bots are changing and evolving, and how fast they have to move in response. When you buy a bot protection solution, you don’t have to worry about building an internal cybersecurity R&D team (and all the associated overhead costs). The vendor has this team already, and they are scouring the web for the latest threats every day, deploying continuous updates and improvements to their protection solution.

Scalability & Adaptability

Bot management vendors know that attacks tend to come in waves—hordes of scalpers during flash sales and limited-edition releases, masses of scrapers gathering data from websites, and other cyberattacks. Vendors know to ensure their solution can handle varying levels of traffic. Bot protection software vendors also often provide different tiers for customers based on the size of the company—as your business grows, so, too, can your protection. And all without putting additional strain on your internal IT infrastructure and team.

Comprehensive Analytics & Reporting

Another missing piece from a solution you build in-house is the ability to deep-dive into your traffic and the blocking decisions made by the engine. Therefore, many vendors have invested time into building out their analytics and reporting capabilities, usually in the form of a centralized dashboard, where customers can gather information about how the solution is working for them.

Cost-Effectiveness

Do you have the money and time to spend hiring more and more people to keep up with the ever-growing threat of bots and online fraud? Most companies would rather spend money elsewhere. In the long run (and many times even the short run), using a bot protection solution from a reputable vendor will save you money. The vendor takes care of the underlying architecture, security, responding to threats, and keeping up with bot development—keeping your business safe and expenses down.