IBM is partnering with Cloudflare to provide bot management capabilities to help protect IBM Cloud customers' websites from malicious bots and automated threats.

The new Cloudflare Bot Management on IBM Cloud Internet Services (CIS), builds on an existing partnership between the two vendors. The IBM CIS offering got its start in 2018 as a technology service that brings Cloudflare capabilities including distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection to IBM Cloud users.

With bot management, the goal is to help protect IBM Cloud users against the growing sophistication and volume of malicious bots. According to Cloudflare, around 25% of all internet traffic comes from malicious bots.

"We are seeing in the market and customers are facing this every day where the bot attacks are getting more sophisticated," Nataraj Nagaratnam, IBM fellow, CTO, cloud security, told SDxCentral. "So the traditional way of using rules and policies to detect [bots is] not sufficient."

The Cloudflare Bot Management service makes use of advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms to help identify potentially malicious bot traffic.

Matt Harrell, global head of channels and alliances at Cloudflare, explained to SDxCentral that Cloudflare has access to a vast volume of network and attack data that provides a good basis for their ML and behavioral analytics. Harrell emphasized that ML really is as good as the data that it's receiving and Cloudflare gets a lot of data on which it can base real-time decisions. "We block an average of about 140 billion cyberthreats each day," Harrell said.

Harrell added that as more IBM Cloud customers use Cloudflare's bot management technology, it will help enrich the data and ML models to provide better protection over time.

"As we spin up more IBM Cloud customers on our bot management technology, it will continue to enrich our data,” Harrell said. “And we'll learn more and more over time — this will make our products and outcomes better for IBM specific customers.”

With the new bot service, IBM is adding yet another set of cloud security capabilities for enterprises to consider.

When it comes to figuring what an enterprise actually needs, Nagaratnam said IBM is advocating that organizations take a risk-based approach.

The risk-based approach involves customers looking at the different types of controls and capabilities they need, based on the risks they face and the data they need to protect. Those capabilities come in different layers for data, workload, network and identity protection. With this approach, organizations can take a set of capabilities from a defense-in-depth and zero-trust perspective.

Nagaratnam noted that IBM also provides reference architectures and prescriptive solutions based on industries and risk factors. So while IBM offers various capabilities, customers can use them together, based on their organizations’ specific risk profiles.

"As enterprises adopt the risk-based strategy, there is no one silver bullet," Nagaratnam said. "They think about it as a composite set of capabilities."