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Are Bots Breaking Your Budget & Business? The True Cost of Bad Bot Traffic

The truth is, many companies don’t realize how advanced malicious automation has gotten, and they may not even know that they have a bot problem at all. If you’re serving up traffic to bots, you’re spending money on infrastructure, systems, tools, and personnel that you shouldn’t have to. This blog post looks at the blight of bot traffic and its consequences on an organization’s overall costs. 

The Blight of Bot Traffic

With everyone working, shopping, and living online these days, traffic to your online channels is likely on the upswing. But if you dig into your traffic, you will see that not all of it is from legitimate users. Less than two-thirds of all Internet traffic is actual people — the rest is automated — and not just the good kind. Our research shows that at least a quarter of all Internet traffic is comprised of bad bots from bot operators leveraging automation at scale. 

Our customer, True Alliance, experienced the negative impact of bad bot traffic before using our solution.

“Almost all types of fraud hitting our websites use bots today. Over the past years, we have seen malicious automation grow in volume and sophistication. Our revenue was at risk, our website performance and customer experience were getting hit, and our IT costs were increasing as we were trying to keep up with the malicious traffic.” — Regan MacDonald, Group IT Manager, True Alliance

You’re likely aware of the havoc bad bots can wreak from credential abuse that leads to account takeover (ATO) to application denial of service (DoS) and denial of inventory, from carding and cracking to web scraping – whether it’s pricing scraping or content scraping – and the list goes on. That’s why many online companies deploy a bot management solution. However, the fundamental architecture of these legacy anti-bot solutions still allow bad bots into their infrastructure, and as a result, they aren’t effective at stopping malicious automation.

Unfortunately, the impact of letting bad bot traffic in has consequences not only for your security posture but also for your budget. You are essentially paying for all that non-human traffic to your online channels — an expense that will never yield leads, sales, or real customer engagement. Downtime due to denial of service (DoS) is also quite costly, ranging from $140,000 to $540,000 per hour according to Gartner. Adding to this cost is the fact that traditional solutions are expensive to install and maintain and typically require people or services to monitor them. 

Bad bot traffic also has unseen but very real consequences. For example, bots can slow down websites, which negatively impacts conversion rates. For every one-second delay, conversion rates drop 7%. Furthermore, one out of every 10 users who have a bad experience won’t return, whether that’s from the site being unavailable or just frustratingly slow. So any online business delivering a poor customer experience due to bots has likely lost 10% of its future customers, impacting revenue and profits long into the future. The use of CAPTCHAs in some bot management solutions is a further deterrent to optimizing online conversions, as they introduce end-user friction. What’s worse is that bots are getting increasingly better at defeating CAPTCHAs.

The Cost Savings of Better Bot Management

What if there was a way to stop bad bot traffic before it ever got through the front door, one that offered superior protection for a low total cost of ownership — and eliminated all the additional costs associated with bad bots? Such an approach would: 

  • Protect online revenue by eliminating bot-driven latency and downtime
  • Clean up your metrics for more accurate website analytics and greater visibility into your web traffic
  • Increase conversion rates through an invisible, frictionless experience for customers without the use of CAPTCHAs
  • Reduce unnecessary IT and operational overhead by rightsizing traffic to authentic human user traffic only
  • Eliminate costs and headaches associated with other solutions and resources needed to maintain them

In this way, you can see that mitigating bots is far more than a security tool and that its benefits extend beyond the security and engineering teams. It helps business executives grow their revenue, increase operating margins, and improve their competitiveness. Companies that are new to bot management gain all the benefits of eliminating unwanted bad bot traffic. Those who move from legacy solutions also benefit from a simple and superiorly effective approach based on modern architecture. Teams quickly realize ROI by savings on infrastructure offload costs and assured revenue due to removing downtime and increasing conversion rates. Numerous customers have been able to apply the infrastructure offload savings to justify the cost of implementing our bot mitigation service.

“Here’s an easy way to look at ROI: an attacker gaining access to a single guest account would be unacceptable to us. The first time Kasada prevented an account takeover event, we saw value. We see very regular updates and new features added to the product – indicating Kasada’s commitment to continuous improvement – and full transparency on pricing.” — Lawson Kelly, Vice President and Global Chief Technology Officer, Hyatt Hotels

Check out our report that calculates the ROI of bot management, diving in-depth into the benefits and costs associated with bot attacks and how our modern architecture yields “immediate value” according to our customers.

Ready to see how Kasada’s bot mitigation solution stops advanced persistent bots that others can’t? Request a demo today.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Kasada authored by Kasada. Read the original post at: https://www.kasada.io/cost-of-bad-bot-traffic/