Introducing effortless bot management for a better, safer web

We’ve all been there, clicking and hoping we can score Beyoncé tickets or limited-edition sneakers – and despite your fast fingers you still lose out. Or maybe your username and password to your favorite retailer were stolen, along with thousands of other customers’ login information, and used in a credential-stuffing attack. This leads to frustration on the customer side, but the pain is magnified on the business side. There’s the negative brand image and lost revenue, not to mention the heavy resource utilization. Your operations teams are exhausted, battling an army of bots designed to hoard products, defraud businesses, and bypass security measures. Across industries, bots are an increasingly painful threat.

Teams find that existing bot mitigation solutions are often complex, resource-intensive, and disrupt development workflows. It’s hard to find a solution that keeps things simple, is highly effective and accurate, and doesn’t tank your operational efficiency or break your budget. You need a solution that provides more freedom for your teams and maintains more flexibility for your users.

Introducing Fastly Bot Management

We’ve listened to your struggles and collaborated with customers who understand the bot problem all too well. Fastly Bot Management is our flagship bot solution that protects your website, applications, and valuable data from unwanted automated traffic. Our bot-specific features and mitigation techniques enable you to:

• Automatically detect and classify bots through a variety of methods, including client fingerprinting, known bot signatures, and traffic patterns

• Instantly mitigate bots through interactive or non-interactive challenges, rate limiting, blocking, and more.

• Gain real-time visibility to track bot trends, identify new threats, and see what bots were blocked as well as why

Bot Management builds upon the accuracy, ease of use, and flexibility of our Next-Gen WAF and the scalability and performance of our global edge cloud network for deeper bot visibility and robust mitigation techniques. And as part of the Fastly Edge Cloud Platform, you can deploy this solution natively, without adding more vendor complexity. Here’s what sets us apart:

• One Platform: Our product is instantly available for Next-Gen WAF customers and requires no additional software deployment to configure, manage, or maintain. Manage everything from a single interface to streamlining processes and reducing data silos. This simplifies administration, reporting, and user management compared to juggling multiple-point solutions.

• Effortless and Effective: Our unique signals-based technology, powered by the continuously updated threat intelligence of our Network Learning Exchange (NLX), delivers faster and more accurate bot blocking compared to traditional, regex methods. Think of it as set it and forget it - Fastly Bot Management constantly adapts to the latest bot threats.

• Unparalleled Performance: Fastly Bot Management operates at the network edge, minimizing latency and protecting your application and APIs from malicious traffic. This translates to a smoother end-user experience and reduced operational costs.

• Developer-friendly: Integration with existing DevOps and security tools is seamless. Fastly Bot Management offers intuitive server-side controls, empowering developers without sacrificing security.

• Unmatched scalability: Built with sustainability in mind, Fastly Bot Management effortlessly handles high-traffic websites and applications, ensuring optimal performance even during peak usage periods. The Fastly Edge network provides the power and capacity to handle even the largest bot attacks. Our architecture automatically scales to maintain optimal performance under any load.

Fastly Bot Management operates at the network edge to protect your infrastructure and your users

A real-world example

One of our e-commerce customers previously relied on a cumbersome and ineffective bot mitigation solution with a less than responsive support team. With Fastly Bot Management, they experienced a dramatic turnaround: 

• Reduced OpEx: Better efficacy and user experience allowed the retailer to remove their existing point solution, saving on extensive vendor costs and tool management 

• Improved visibility and blocking efficacy: Unlike the point solution’s “black box” decisioning, our solution allowed the retailer to see more bot traffic and dive into request data. They quickly built rules to protect key sites and saw immediate results against bot attacks their point solution missed, including those focused on account takeover (ATO) / credential stuffing. 

• Enhanced developer experience: Developer workloads were immediately eased and teams were freed from constant tuning cycles and able to focus on core tasks.

• Improved application performance: With decisions handled at the network edge, the customer got better app performance and lowered requests to origin, all without a JavaScript integration.

With Fastly Bot Management, it only took about ten minutes for our customer to go from validation to enabling full blocking of malicious bots. No complex training or continuous adjustments were needed. They found the solution immediately covered their requirements, including granular controls and visibility, ease of use, customizable policies, scalable performance, and seamless integration – realizing the true power of the platform.

The Fastly platform advantage

The bot solution market has grown to meet the complex automation challenges organizations are facing today but still fails to meet customer expectations on efficacy, usability, and performance. We built Bot Management with features to safe, engaging experiences for our customers that go beyond what point solutions can offer. Building it directly into the Edge Cloud Platform allows us to continuously innovate new features that integrate seamlessly with our Network Services, Security, Compute, and Observability solutions. And as part of our unified web application and API protection (WAAP) solution with Next-Gen WAF, API Security, and DDoS protection, you benefit through simplified management, reduced costs, and consistent security policies, all while our platform provides the ultimate in scalability and future-proofing to handle any challenge.

Protect your business from bots

Fastly Bot Management offers a highly effective, low-overhead solution for bot mitigation, safeguarding your web applications, data, and brand reputation. Take control of your online environment and ensure a secure and reliable experience for your customers. Discover what Fastly Bot Management can do for your organization.