Historically, large ISPs and enterprises deployed dedicated scrubbing hardware — racks of purpose-built appliances from Arbor, Radware, or NSFOCUS. Today, cloud-based DDoS protection delivered via a reverse proxy is the dominant model for the vast majority of organizations. Here's why.
On-Premise Scrubbing: The Arguments
- Full data sovereignty — no traffic leaves your network.
- Deterministic performance — no dependency on a third-party network.
- No ongoing subscription cost (after significant CapEx).
- Required in some regulated environments with strict data localization rules.
The Problems with On-Premise
- Your upstream link is still the bottleneck: a 10Tbps attack saturates your 10Gbps link before scrubbing hardware sees a packet.
- Hardware must be over-provisioned for peak attack scenarios you may never experience.
- Maintenance, firmware updates, and staff training are ongoing costs.
- Attack traffic must still reach your datacenter — just to be dropped there.
Cloud (Reverse Proxy) Model Advantages
- Attacks are absorbed upstream — before traffic reaches your infrastructure.
- Capacity scales instantly — no hardware bottleneck.
- DNS change activation in minutes, not a BGP diversion that takes 30+ minutes.
- Akarguard operates 10Tbps+ of scrubbing capacity — more than most on-prem deployments combined.
Verdict for most teams
If you have regulatory data localization requirements that prohibit routing traffic through a third party, evaluate on-prem. Otherwise, cloud-based reverse proxy scrubbing is faster, cheaper, and more scalable.