NETSCOUT has announced a significant expansion of its Arbor Cloud distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) protection capabilities, doubling the mitigation capacity to 33 terabits per second. The company cited the increasing scale and complexity of attacks targeting internet-facing infrastructure as the primary driver for this upgrade.
The enhanced service will utilize 16 traffic-scrubbing centers located around the world. NETSCOUT expects to complete the full deployment by the end of August 2026. This additional capacity aims to safeguard digital services that facilitate monitoring, remote access, and operational data exchange within connected infrastructure systems.
These critical services often bridge enterprise IT environments and operational technology (OT) networks. Disruptions at this intersection can impact access to systems used for overseeing assets and coordinating industrial processes, even if the actual controllers or operational equipment are not directly targeted by the attack.
To support this expansion, NETSCOUT is integrating DDoS infrastructure acquired in a recent transaction. The company stated that this move provides direct control over the network used to deliver and scale its mitigation services, allowing for more responsive defense mechanisms.
The Arbor Cloud platform employs a hybrid model that connects on-premises DDoS systems with cloud-based traffic scrubbing. Automated signaling between these environments allows some attacks to be handled close to customer infrastructure, while high-volume traffic is redirected to the cloud network for filtering.
On-premises controls can detect and block malicious traffic near an operator’s environment but cannot maintain availability if an upstream internet connection becomes saturated. Cloud mitigation filters this traffic before it reaches the customer network, addressing a gap that individual organizations often cannot fill alone.
The UK National Cyber Security Centre has noted that determined attackers can typically generate more traffic than individual organizations can handle without upstream support. This division of responsibility is particularly relevant for utilities, transport operators, and industrial IoT deployments that rely on both local operational systems and externally connected services.
