Bot Management – Bots are automated programs designed to complete tasks. The majority of bots do repetitive tasks. Programmers create bots to execute tasks at very high speeds.
Harmful Bots – Bots that are “bad” are now one of the most serious threats to companies. Malicious bot traffic can slow down a website’s efficiency, tie up online inventory, compromise personal information, and result in higher customer churn and revenue loss. They trigger a slew of business issues by targeting blogs, mobile apps, and APIs. DDoS attack, spamming, ad fraud and web scraping are examples of these types of attacks.
Useful Bots – Bots that are useful contribute to the web’s growth and development. They crawl site pages to assess SERP rankings and keep real-time websites up to date with data, or they assist customers in finding the best price for a product or locating stolen assets. It is important for today’s companies to be able to differentiate between good and poor bots.
Some Noteworthy Features of Bot Management Solution are –
- Extensibility and Flexibility – Bot management extends beyond the website. All online properties, including your website, mobile apps, and APIs, are protected by an enterprise-grade solution. APIs and mobile applications are protected, as is interoperability with the business partners’ systems and critical third-party APIs. The bot mitigation solution is simple to set up and use, with no infrastructure changes or the possibility of traffic being rerouted from your CDN (Content Delivery Network) or DNS.
- Customer Experience – Latency on websites and applications degrades the user experience. Any bot mitigation strategy does not add to the latency, but rather find and address problems that contribute to it. Bot detection accuracy is crucial. Bot management solution not only differentiates between good and bad bots but also improves the user experience by allowing approved bots from search engines and partners. During peak hours, maintaining a consistent user experience on sites like B2C e-commerce portals can be difficult. To tackle traffic surges, the solution should be scalable. It’s also important to keep false positives to a minimum so that the user experience isn’t harmed.
- Bot Detection Engine – Bot management solutions use JavaScript challenges or CAPTCHA challenges to identify bots. They also use behavioural analysis to assess which users are humans and which are bots, i.e., comparing a user’s actions to previous user behaviour. For common pages, page requests can reach millions per minute, and data processing for bot detection must be done in real-time. This makes manual intervention difficult even inserting suspected IP address ranges is ineffective against bots that cycle through a large number of addresses in order to avoid detection. Bot mitigation engines with advanced technology including machine learning assist in automating their management capabilities, reducing the time and workforce required to handle bots dramatically. The overall cost of ownership is significantly reduced by automated responses to threats and a system that does not need manual intervention.
Bot management solutions are the key to ensure business continuity and performance, regardless of the size of an organization. The growing volume of global bot traffic and the magnitude of their cumulative effect suggests that bot management solutions are critical to ensure business continuity and success.
