This year many companies have ventured into the Web Application Firewall (WAF) market as a way to help protect their customers. There are a number of popular options with different price points. A good firewall will go to great lengths to secure company servers and data from hackers looking to make a profit or cause havoc.
There are a number of popular products in the market like CloudFlare, Sucuri, and Evoq but there are many that don’t get much attention.
In order to make some sense of this space, I looked at the WAF market as a whole to determine which vendors have succeeded, failed, or are still in the development phase.
Looking at the market, there are a number of companies that stand out as having good products.
These include CloudFlare, Sucuri, Evoq AppTrana, AWS, Akamai, Imperva and which are not popular but have good products like Haltdos WAF (web application firewall).
Benefits of A Web Application Firewall
A Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a type of software that safeguards web applications from outside attacks and breaches. Utilizing a set of rules and filters, WAFs protect against various malicious attacks like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and denial of service.
These products often have a modular design, which makes them easy to scale.
Benefits of WAFs
In order to evaluate the benefits of WAFs, I broke down the market into their various components:
- The first component is the product’s technological capabilities, which are a direct result of the product’s nature. For example, some WAFs protect against a broad set of attacks like SQL injection, others only cover a certain attack type.
Do All Web Application Firewalls Provide the Same Level of Protection?
This article investigates how well Web Application Firewalls work in protecting against malicious attacks.
Do they do the same thing for every kind of attack? Some products say that they protect against a broad range of attacks, but in fact they only provide protection against a few.
For example, some products protect against SQL injection but not cross-site scripting, and vice versa. Others claim to protect against a broad range of attacks, such as SQL injection, file disclosure, user impersonation, remote OS command execution, HTML injection, SSI, etc., but when an actual attack is used they don’t perform nearly as well as the other products.
How Do I Know What My Company Needs in Terms of a Web Application Firewall?
If you are the owner of a business, you may not be aware of all the risks that are in place in today’s online world. The Web Application Firewall will help you understand what your company needs in terms of protection.
A Web Application Firewall acts like a firewall in the network of a business. It monitors everything that goes out, and everything that comes in, and identifies any security threats.
The Web Application Firewall then uses the system administrator to block or allow specific incoming traffic on a case-by-case basis, based on what it knows about the security threats in the environment.
Synopsis
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) protect your web applications from attacks, such as SQL injection. These products are specifically designed to safeguard web applications and can contain many features. The market for WAFs is growing and some of the most popular manufacturers are Cisco, Fortinet, McAfee, and Symantec.
WAF products help protect web applications by acting as a security filter between the network and the application server. WAFs can be defined as “a collection of rules designed to proactively stop known and unknown types of attacks on web-based applications.”
