I am the administrator of the Web Application Firewall. I manage all the web applications and security regarding it. Some of the main use cases are related to OWASP Top 10 and bot attacks.
We are a distributor of all types of cybersecurity products. We handle more than 170 OEMs, and Imperva Web Application Firewall is one of them.
We were facing issues related to web servers and OWASP Top 10. We had bots rather than human traffic. We went with Imperva for a single-stack solution. We have bot protection, DDoS protection, web application firewall, and database security from Imperva.
It is one of the best solutions that I have worked with. After deploying it, bot attacks have completely stopped. When it comes to OWASP Top 10, it responds very clearly when we do testing, so we are not facing any threats. Compliance is also very good. So, overall, it is very good for security and compliance.
Imperva is known in the market for customization and deployments according to the use cases of the customers. You can deploy it the way you want. You can deploy it in the inline mode, reverse proxy mode, or transfer and bridge mode. You can deploy it according to the environment or infra of the company. In terms of integration, with one click of a button, you can integrate it with your SIEM solution. You have preconfigured SIEM codes. You just need to run that code in the SIEM application, and that is it. You will start getting the logs. It is pretty easy.
For certain web servers, I have it on-prem, and for certain web servers, I have it on the cloud. A basic use case of the customers is that they want a single dashboard for the cloud WAF or on-prem WAF. There is a solution called attack analytics in Imperva. It integrates with on-prem and the cloud, so in a single dashboard, you can see what is happening in your on-prem as well as cloud setup. It is very easy. When it comes to reporting, you can take reports anywhere anytime and you can take logs anywhere anytime. Someone who does not know about cybersecurity can understand the logs. Logs are in English instead of the raw format. Anybody who knows English can understand them. Reporting is very easy. These reports can also be used for audit and compliance.
We use SIEM solutions. We use Splunk, and we use Elastic. We use Datadog and Securonix. I integrated Imperva with Elastic and Splunk. We have a pre-written code. We just have to download that code and run the code in the SIEM solution server. After that, the logs start showing. It is that easy. Integration is that easy. I have also done integration with multifactor authentication, security key, HSM, etc. I have worked with RSA and YubiKey. Both of them were very easy. The integration happened with the click of a button. The integration is seamless and is working perfectly. Our clients are happy. We are happy.
There are many features. There is ease of deployment. You can deploy the Imperva Web Application Firewall in two to three minutes. After that, you have to set the policies. For setting policies, you have toggle buttons. You can turn something on or off.
Writing rules is very easy. There is a toggle button. You do not have to write the parsers and rules. You do not have to be well-versed in it. Anybody who works with the Imperva console for a month can master the solution.
The only disadvantage of Imperva is that it is a pretty costly solution.
It has been around one year.
It is completely stable. For stability, I would rate it an eight out of ten.
It scales very well. I would rate it a nine out of ten for scalability.
In terms of traffic volumes, being a distributor, we do not face the issue of many customers flooding our website. It is not like an e-commerce company. At peak hours, there is almost 500 Mbps of network traffic. That is it.
I would rate their support a ten out of ten. Even if I call at 2 AM, they pick up, and they answer.
I have experience with Akamai and Cloudflare. Cloudflare is not made for enterprises or big companies. It is only for small and medium organizations. This is where Imperva comes into the picture.
Akamai and Imperva are pretty much similar. The only thing that makes them different is the SLA. Imperva is the only vendor that gives three-second SLAs for DDoS attacks. Imperva can mitigate any DDoS attack in just three seconds. This is the main thing that differentiates Imperva from Akamai. Another thing is that the deployment of Akamai is very complex. You need around two to three days to deploy it. You require senior-level engineers. It is very hard to understand as compared to Imperva.
If you go with the Cloud Web Application Firewall, you can complete deployment in a maximum of half an hour. On-prem deployment is a bit complex. It takes three to four hours.
There are only two people who work with Imperva. We handle many solutions, and we have two people handling Imperva. We manage everything in Imperva only with two engineers. The company does not need to hire many people.
It is very costly, but the return on investment is very high. Its cost was around $70,000, and we got it back in just six months.
It is very expensive. A basic license costs around $10,000. This is the only disadvantage of the solution. Everything else is pretty good.
When a client comes to us saying that they want to implement Imperva, the first thing that we ask them is if they are willing to spend that much. If they say yes, then we do not even compare it to any other product. We just go for Imperva. Feature-wise, we are confident of it. Any customer would go for it in terms of features.
Overall, I would rate Imperva Web Application Firewall a nine out of ten.