Imperva Web Application Firewall and Microsoft Azure Application Gateway are major competitors in web application security. Imperva seems to have the upper hand with its superior flexibility in deployment and comprehensive security measures, while Microsoft Azure Application Gateway excels in integration with Azure services and scalability.
Features: Imperva Web Application Firewall excels with correlated attack validation, dynamic profiling, and inline threat detection. Its strong integration capabilities, DDoS protection, and API security are particularly noteworthy for application-specific protection. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway stands out with seamless load balancing, robust autoscaling, and its tight integration within the Azure ecosystem, facilitating secure application deployment.
Room for Improvement: Imperva Web Application Firewall could improve in policy management and the user interface, with some users noting challenges in initial setup and configuration of rules. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway is criticized for high configuration complexity, limited protocol support, and missing competitive features. Enhancements in security features, reporting, and support for more protocols are desired.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Imperva offers easy deployment across On-premises, Hybrid, and Cloud environments, catering to diverse infrastructure needs. Customer service is generally positively regarded, despite occasional delays. Azure is highly compatible with cloud-based setups, ideal for enterprises engaged in its ecosystem, although challenges in initial setup complexity and support response times are noted.
Pricing and ROI: Imperva Web Application Firewall, though costly, is noted for high ROI from effective threat prevention. The pricing model is complex but justifiable by its protection capabilities against DDoS attacks. Microsoft Azure Application Gateway, while considered expensive, presents a cost-effective choice for those already engaged with Azure, with scalable pricing and integration benefits balancing cost and functionality.
Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global connectivity cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the Internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can experience more secure, faster websites and applications.
Currently, there are millions of Internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network
continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for
millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.
Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every
client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this
possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the
information requests are always only seconds away.
Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to
access Cloudflare's highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official
election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project
Athenian, also at no additional cost.
Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to
ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in
turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD (bring your own device)
access ensure end users and employees always have the best resources and technology
available to them at all times.
Cloudflare benefits
Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:
- Faster load times
- Robust DNS security
- Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)
- Free universal SSL
- Image enhancement
- Automatic browser caching
- Next-generation cloud load balancer
- Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
- Rate limiting
- Minification
- Zero-trust capabilities
- Cost-effective
- Reduced carbon footprint
Reviews from real users
“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare
comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and
an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your
website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a
certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange
“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage
applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare
also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering,
so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network Engineer at Ufinet
“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very
well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” PeerSpot user, Competence Center Manager at a tech services company
Imperva Web Application Firewall is a versatile solution that protects web applications and databases from various attacks, including DDoS, cross-site scripting, and SQL injection attacks. It offers data security, availability, and access control and can be deployed on-premises or on the cloud.
The solution has good security against web attacks and offers advanced bot protection, API security, and mitigation features. Imperva WAF is easy to configure and deploy; it has good customer service and an excellent user interface.
Azure Application Gateway is a web traffic load balancer that enables you to manage traffic to your web applications. Traditional load balancers operate at the transport layer (OSI layer 4 - TCP and UDP) and route traffic based on source IP address and port, to a destination IP address and port.
To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.
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