Typically these web application firewalls act as an additional layer primarily for traffic. The web application firewalls are more of a safeguard if a company still has legacy technologies, for which they don't have the patches. It's basically used for the protection and security of web applications.
The solution has been quite stable. It's reliable.
The initial setup is mostly straightforward.
I wouldn't say that the solution is flexible. The technology is moving towards having the firewall, which is distributed to each workload, rather than having a static firewall pertaining to a particular application or a cohort of applications. There are other solutions that are much more flexible in this regard. VMware, for example, gives good flexibility in this regard.
The solution needs to leverage some additional features to a broader scale of software-defined networks.
Given the distributed computing and decentralized architecture with people working in hybrid modules, there'll be lesser and lesser control. People would like to have, for example, edge computing, et cetera, which is going to be the future for computing. Hence every organization would like to scale the design to the extent where they would like to have their defenses also go along with their workloads.
If, for an SDN, I need to go to VMware, and, for WAF, I need to go to Barracuda, or different other firewalls, the company is losing market share. They need to increase flexibility, agility, scaling, et cetera, as that is going to be the new normal, maybe in the next two to five years.
We've been using the solution for close to two years at this point.
The solution is quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.
I'm not sure about the scalability. I would need to explore it more. The most scalable products are likely VMware's NSX, as it is a company that's bit on cloud migration cloud transformation strategies. They'd like to ensure their workloads are safe and secure. I don't see this in traditional RAFs or even firewalls.
It's difficult to found how many users are on the solution at this time as we use multiple web application firewalls on different applications. It is not every application however, there would be certain applications that would have a WAF. Likely, it's around 10,000 users across applications.
We do plan to continue to use the solution into the future.
We haven't really had to engage with technical support. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are in general.
We did use a different solution before switching to Barracuda. Typically, we run a POC first before moving onto anything new, which is what happened in this case.
The initial setup is pretty straightforward. However, it does help to have some depth of knowledge with the solution.
I cannot recall the exact amount of time the deployment took.
While I don't have dedicated staff on the solution to handle maintenance, I have about six people on my team that can cover whatever needs to be done when something arises.
Licensing is something the procurement team takes care of. I don't have any insights in terms of the licensing agreement or costs that may be involved.
We are customers and end-users.
Typically, we keep updating our infrastructure, and therefore, we are likely using the latest version of the solution, however, I do not have the version number on-hand.
I would recommend the solution to other organizations.
Overall, we've been quite satisfied with the capabilities of this product. I would rate it at an eight out of ten.