You've got a 40-person IT department, hybrid cloud headaches, vendor SLAs, and a compliance audit around the corner. Leadership still doesn't see why cybersecurity needs its own budget line. And now your CISO is flagging that you have no dedicated DDoS mitigation layer. For enterprise IT teams across the US and Canada, DDoS protection always lives on the "we'll handle it soon" list - until a 3-hour outage lands it in front of the board. Here's how to get ahead of it before that happens. What Is a DDoS Attack, in Plain Language? A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is when someone floods your website or server with so much fake traffic that it can't serve your real customers. Think of it like thousands of people jamming a store's phone lines at once - no legitimate customer can get through. These attacks come from networks of compromised computers (called botnets) spread across the globe. They're cheap to hire on the dark web and can be launched against any business, large or small.…