Web applications are the primary targets of cyber attacks, making a robust WAF an essential security measure for every organization.
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant 2022 provides insight into Imperva’s seven-time leadership, providing comprehensive protection in one solution.
Cloudflare WAF works in combination with reverse proxy and content delivery network to offer out-of-the-box integrations and performance, such as Bot Management and DDoS Protection.
1. Threat Intelligence
Threat Intelligence of a WAF must provide security teams with useful contextual information about potential threats, as well as being delivered at times when security teams can act on it.
Threat intelligence is typically delivered as a data feed. This feed may provide technical details of attacks such as vectors, exploits and command and control domains; as well as more contextually rich data such as trending topics on social media.
Consider searching for vendors offering multiple data feeds and an adaptable threat intelligence architecture, which allow for you to select what data to receive, filter, and prioritize it based on customer case studies in similar uses cases. In addition, assess whether it offers suite functionality rather than point solutions since suites tend to provide wider features that make integration easier within an organization’s existing security systems.
2. Bot Management
Bot management capabilities protect web applications against malicious and unproductive bots by restricting unauthorized user interaction. They employ behavioral analysis, machine learning, and other techniques to detect and block bots that compromise security or degrade performance.
Bot mitigation reduces users’ reliance on outdated technologies that slow them down with captchas and challenges, while simultaneously identifying and blocking automated attacks using techniques such as bot detection, web crawling filtering filtering API protection validation.
Imperva holds an exceptional market presence as both an appliance WAF and cloud WAF service, being recognized in Leaders quadrant in both segments. They deliver an effective blend of security features and innovations as well as easy-to-manage solutions that extend functionality beyond what can be achieved using network firewalls, IPSs or open source/free WAFs.
3. API Security
Web application and API protection solutions must provide a balance of security features to meet business requirements, particularly when managing API traffic. This is particularly crucial when dealing with API traffic management.
Businesses are increasingly turning to APIs as a tool to foster innovation and accelerate service launches, yet many remain unaware of them. Shadow APIs tend to provide closer abstractions from backend services and databases and go undetected by internal security teams – an increasing concern in businesses today.
WAF providers must adapt their detection of malicious API traffic in order to secure this increasingly vulnerable attack surface. For instance, WAF must recognize API calls made by automated tools, monitor privilege escalation processes and prevent one host attacking another host (cross-site scripting). Additionally, they must ensure they can differentiate between legitimate and malicious requests using various security technologies such as anti-DDoS, bot management and WAF. Download the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report for cloud Web Application Firewalls to access its findings or click here for an alternative approach to learning about how Imperva provides comprehensive protection for businesses of any size with their web application firewall and AI-powered security platform.
4. Analytics
As online threats increase and compliance requirements expand, web apps and websites must be safeguarded from DDoS attacks, SQL injections and bots using an API protection, bot management and performance optimization solution from WAF. This is best achieved using WAF technology which offers API protection, bot management capabilities as well as performance optimization features.
Cloudflare customers continue to express satisfaction with its bundled service and strong security with performance-based focuses. They would appreciate better ways of handling policy management and alert aggregation; additionally they lament an inability to block specific IP addresses or identify bots.
Akamai continues to sit comfortably within the Leaders quadrant. Customers seeking a cloud WAF capable of supporting large-scale applications while offering multiple performance optimization and security features typically add Akamai to their shortlist when price sensitivity is minimal – particularly those organizations already using Akamai as CDN. Their new bot mitigation feature may also draw customers towards Akamai; however, pricing models remain high.