Bot Manager
Some bots play a legitimate role in an organization’s online business strategy. Others harm the business by reducing competitive advantage, getting between an organization and its customers, or committing fraud.
Bot Manager provides identification, categorization, management, and reporting of bot traffic in the cloud
Websites provide online businesses with an unprecedented level of contact with customers and end users. However, they also place business information where it can be easily accessed by other entities – often using automated tools known as “bots”. For many organizations, bots represent up to 40% of their overall website traffic, from good bots engaged in essential business tasks to bad bots performing harmful activities. Regardless of business impact, bot traffic can reduce website performance for legitimate users and increase IT costs. Organizations need a flexible framework to better manage their interaction with different categories of bots and the impact that bots have on their business and IT infrastructure.
BENEFITS TO YOUR BUSINESS
- Gain visibility into the amount and characteristics of bot traffic attempting to access your website.
- Lower costs by slowing the growth of your web infrastructure and reducing the IT overhead required to manage bots yourself.
- Improve user experience by reducing the impact of bots on the web infrastructure during regular business hours.
- Maintain a competitive advantage and retain control over customer relationships by preventing price and content scraping.
- Combat fraudulent activity by validating client behavior against legitimate user workflow.
Bot Manager
a flexible framework to manage the wide array of bots
Traditional bot mitigation tools typically only block bot traffic, impacting beneficial and harmful bots alike while prompting bots to evolve and return better hidden from detection.
Bot Manager relies on the simple premise that not all bots are created equal. Many bots play a legitimate role in an organization’s online business strategy. Others harm the business by reducing competitive advantage, getting between an organization and its customers, or committing fraud.
Traditional bot mitigation tools typically only block bot traffic, impacting beneficial and harmful bots alike while prompting bots to evolve and return better hidden from detection.
Bot Manager provides organizations with a flexible framework to better manage the wide array of bots accessing their website every day. It offers the abilities to identify bots as they first arrive, categorize different types of bots, and apply the most appropriate management policy for each category. This allows greater control over how each organization interacts with different types of bots, maximizing business benefits while minimizing negative business or IT impact over the long term.
How it works
identifies bots as they connects
Bot Manager combines the visibility and scale of the globally-distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform™ with bot-specific capabilities to identify, categorize, manage, and report on bot traffic.
Bot Manager identifies bots as they connect to websites through the closest Akamai Edge server, using a combination of Akamai visibility into worldwide bot activity, bots already known to individual organizations, and the real-time detection of unknown bots.
Organizations have the flexibility to manage identified bots individually or create categories of bots, assigning different management policies based on the desired interaction with each bot or bot category. Bot Manager helps organizations better understand their bot traffic through the Security Center dashboard and built-in bot activity and bot analysis reports.
Key Capabilities
- Akamai-categorized bots — Akamai continuously updates its directory of over 1,200 known bots and bot categories based on interactions with other Akamai customers, using its Cloud Security Intelligence (CSI) data analysis engine.
- Customer-categorized bots — Bot Manager allows organizations to create custom bot signatures and categories to identify specific bots that regularly interact with their website and assign a specific action to be taken.
- Detection of unknown bots — Bot Manager can detect traffic from unknown bots using a variety of characteristics including request rate, request characteristics, bot behavior, and workflow validation.
- Business-oriented policies — Bot Manager enables organizations to categorize different types of bots and create management policies that define how traffic from different categories will be handled based on their business impact.
- Advanced management actions — Bot Manager provides a range of actions that can be applied to different bot categories including alert, block, delay, serve alternate content, and more.
- Analysis and reporting — the Security Center dashboard provides real-time visibility into bot traffic for the website as well as the ability to drill down into different bot categories. Bot Manager also provides preconfigured reports including high-level bot activity, detailed analysis, and sampled bot traffic.
- Logging — Increase your threat posture awareness by integrating event logs with your security information and event management (SIEM) or other reporting solution through Akamai’s Log Delivery Service (LDS).
- Site Shield (optional) — Cloak (hide) your application origin from the public Internet to help prevent bots from bypassing the cloud-based protections of Bot Manager and directly accessing the origin.
- Service Optimization Assistance (optional) — Akamai experts perform regular analysis of bot traffic and the effectiveness of configured management actions and provide recommended changes when needed.
