The DDoS Response Team and Cost Protection

Two of the most valuable Shield Advanced features are the Shield Response Team (SRT) and DDoS cost protection. Together they provide expert human help during an attack and financial relief for the scaling costs an attack causes. Both are exclusive to the Advanced tier.

The Shield Response Team (SRT) is a group of AWS DDoS specialists available to Shield Advanced subscribers. They assist with diagnosing complex attacks, building custom mitigations, and reviewing your defenses. They are your escalation path when an attack overwhelms automatic protections.

You can engage the SRT during an active attack or proactively for architecture reviews. Engaging during an incident requires a Business or Enterprise Support plan. The SRT works with your team to apply mitigations and shorten the time to recovery under pressure.

With proactive engagement enabled, the SRT can contact you directly when Shield detects an attack affecting your application health, even before you notice. This pre-authorization speeds response because the experts are already mobilized when the attack begins rather than waiting for a ticket.

To let the SRT act on your behalf, you grant them an IAM role with managed access (the AWSSRTAccess managed policy) so they can update WAF rules and Shield protections during an incident. Without this delegation they can only advise, not directly apply mitigations.

DDoS cost protection reimburses, via service credits, the usage charges that spike because of a DDoS on a protected resource. Covered services include EC2, Elastic Load Balancing, CloudFront, Route 53, and Global Accelerator scaling that the attack forced. This prevents an attack from becoming a financial weapon.

Cost protection applies only to resources enrolled in Shield Advanced and to charges clearly attributable to a DDoS event. You typically open a support case to claim credits after an attack. Unprotected resources or unrelated cost increases are not eligible, so enrollment matters.

Without cost protection, attackers can pursue economic denial of sustainability: even if your app stays up via auto scaling, the bandwidth and compute bills climb. Cost protection neutralizes this strategy by absorbing attack-driven charges, so defenders are not penalized for staying online.

Linking Route 53 health checks to Shield Advanced improves both detection accuracy and SRT effectiveness. Healthy-versus-unhealthy signals help Shield distinguish an attack from a traffic surge, triggering proactive engagement and mitigation only when your application is genuinely degraded.

Advanced provides global threat dashboards and attack reports summarizing events on your resources. After an incident, the SRT can conduct a post-attack review to harden your architecture. This continuous feedback loop turns each attack into an opportunity to strengthen defenses.

For business-critical workloads, combine Shield Advanced, an SRT access role, proactive engagement, Route 53 health checks, and cost protection. This package delivers expert help, faster mitigation, and financial safety, the full value proposition that justifies the Advanced subscription.

Apply Shield Advanced benefit knowledge.

Shield Advanced adds the Shield Response Team (SRT), AWS experts you can engage during attacks (Business/Enterprise Support required) or via proactive engagement, after granting an SRT IAM role. Cost protection credits attack-driven scaling charges on enrolled resources across EC2, ELB, CloudFront, and Route 53, neutralizing economic denial of sustainability. Route 53 health checks sharpen detection.