Imperva Application Security Platform Reviews

We primarily use the solution for all our corporate websites for port 80 and 443 redirect and protecting all the web pages that we have in our environment.

The solution is very good at intercepting traffic before it gets to our data centers. It saves us some security hits and top-level bad guy stuff. It's very good at protecting us. It keeps anything malicious off of our infrastructure.

We did have a major complaint, however, they fixed it after about a year and a half of complaining. It's not a problem anymore. I don't recall really having any issues with the solution beyond what they have fixed.

The salespeople tend to exaggerate its capabilities, which can cost you money if you don't verify the information.

I've dealt with the solution for two years at this point.

The stability of the solution is very good. I've never heard of any outages that I'm aware of. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches. It's reliable.

The scalability is just based on the number of licenses and in our case, we've maxed out our licenses. They are extremely expensive, and therefore it would be costly to scale.

I haven't had to call technical support, however, from what I've heard, they're okay. They are not great, not bad, just right down the middle.

The infrastructure team did all the certificates on that side. My team took care of security. It's the security settings we set up. There was a lot of complexity in the initial configuration based on our proprietary apps and having to disable or change some settings to allow some stuff to work. That's kind of a normal thing. No matter what WAF you would have, you'd have the same issue.

The licensing of the solution is quite high. Licenses are quite expensive. I'm not sure if they really offer the value that they ultimately charge.

The cost is somewhere around $10,000 a site. For every site, you pay individually. For every DNS entry, you have you pay.

We are just customers and end users.

We're using the WAF. It's the web-based version. Whatever's the current and newest version is what we're using.

I'd advise potential new users to not believe salespeople. That's kind of a standard thing across the industry, however, we were told one thing at the sales side, and then, after we purchased, it was not true what they said. That's extremely disappointing as it actually costs us tens of thousands of dollars more due to the fact that what they said could happen, how their licensing model works, doesn't work the way the sales guy said. That's a giant disappointment.

Overall, the solution does what it says it will do. I'd rate it at an eight out of ten.

We are using it as an application-delivery platform for our entire organization.  

The most valuable feature is that it is cloud-based and we do not need to have an appliance for it in house.  

I do not see any big problems with the product. Imperva has had a lot of experience developing this product platform and it seems appropriate for my use cases. There are a few places where it can be improved.  

An area of improvement that I was looking for in Incapsula at this moment is enhancing the policy levels. For my purposes, I think there are too few policies. The product and what is included may be good, but it has to be improved further in the area of policies.  

Another area that could do with improvement is certificate management. I do not like the way that incapsula handles certificates very much. It needs to be changed or drastically improved to be more fluid.  

We have to be conscious of the architecture updates. Updates for the application architecture may break the existing protection application if we have made any changes. It does not seem that this should be so big of a concern for the end-user and could be handled better.  

We have been using Imperva Incapsula for six months.  

The stability of the product is not usually the issue. Any stability issues would have to do more with extraneous factors.  

We need to know more about the scalability ourselves. We are working on it now to see what we can do. The scalability is inherently good because it is on the cloud. There is nothing much to worry about with the scalability part. But the hands-on experience with it is something we are still exploring.  

There seems to be no limit to scaling the product from the perspective of adding applications. We just put our product on the market. Until and unless the users complain to us, then we will not know if there are growing pains. It is too early in our experience with the product to get the kind of feedback that we need from them.  

We have had only one serious issue after onboarding 50 applications. For one application, we have had some performance and stability issues. It was just one time over the last six months where the problem was affecting the stability. For that one application, we had severe performance issues, and we rolled it back. We are still investigating that issue. We do not know the reason yet that we had a problem with it. We do not know how many of the applications that we try to work will present problems like that. I saw problems with only two applications in total. One is application had an issue with image loading which was not as severe, and the other one was for performance issues. The performance issue was effecting web services.  

Scaling, as far as the number of users, is another type of scalability. Ultimately everybody who uses our services uses Incapsula in a sense by the end of the day. This is because every application has to go through Incapsula.  

We are also having to look at our own environment when considering scalability and trying to take Incapsula forward as far as we can with expansion. We have some issues with our infrastructure. All the infrastructure is not always optimally compatible with Incapsula. Because our infrastructure is not fit for Incapsula due to various reasons, we are working to resolve those issues. Those are not major things, but they are important to resolve and continue to scale, so we are working on it. It will take some time to identify everything and optimize the system. For example, if we implement something like having multiple authentications it comes with new challenges. In the end, it improves what we offer, but there are issues to consider along the way, and even before the implementation. 

The tech support people are good. They are very good.  

For web application firewalls we are actually currently using more than one solution. We are using both Imperva and AWS. Which solution that we use depends upon the environment and depends on the situation. So we are using both solutions but for different situations when there is an advantage to using the capabilities of one product over the other.  

Installation is not complex. It is pretty straightforward.  

We have two people who we use for the deployment of updates and also maintaining this solution. They are part of our team and not from the vendor or other consultancy.  

In my opinion, Imperva Incapsula is not expensive compared to the other similar solutions in this category.  

I have some advice for people who are considering using Imperva. When onboarding an application, they need to be careful with their other infrastructure and systems. The concern is in part to make sure they do not have conflicts. There has to be proper authentication for authorization and the RSA (Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman, data security). During the execution of the task of onboarding, they need to be a little careful to make sure that is not creating an outage.  

So what I would recommend to anyone onboarding an application is that they need to go through the architecture of the application thoroughly before implementing the solution. Do not rush to the end to get it done.  

The best way to implement anything is by taking steps to avoid problems beforehand to end up with a result that has fewer issues.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate Imperva Incapsula as the number one solution. There is not too much to know about it but that it is one of the best products of this type that you can get. But on a scale of one to ten, I give it a nine-out-of-ten because it is not perfect, as good as it is.  

I use the service for protection due to the fact that it has profile functionality.

Protection is the best solution since it has profile functionality.

Interesting alternatives are Akamai and some cloud solutions do exist.

The tool needs to improve CPU and storage memory. 

I have been using the solution for a year. However, my company has been using it for six years. 

Imperva Web Application Firewall is stable. 

The product is scalable, and my company has 20,000 users. One administrator manages the tool. 

Imperva Web Application Firewall is expensive. 

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

The solution has the best volumetric DDoS attacks feature.

The solution needs to be improved every time there are new attacks. They need to add new features and techniques to prevent the attacks.

We have been using the solution for seven years.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. It is suitable for medium and enterprise businesses.

The solution's technical support services are fine. 

Compared with the competitors, the solution provides better security features, including web protection firewall and DDoS protection.

The solution's initial setup process is complicated. You need to include the right security policy and discover the attack trends. The time taken for implementation depends on the project requirements.

The solution's price is reasonable. Although, it is a bit expensive for small companies. The cost of its licenses depends on the specific project requirement.

I advise others to study their requirements while choosing DDoS protection thoroughly. They should know if the CDN is limited to their region or has a global reach. Also, DDoS attacks appear in different ways every single time. Thus, it is challenging to implement. It is crucial to know its surface, nature, and how to implement the security measures.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The tool helps us to meet security requirements. 

I am impressed with the product's scalability, availability, easy management, and security. We were able to integrate the product with Azure and Sentinel. 

I would like the solution to improve its support response time. 

I am working on the solution for two to three years. 

I would rate the product's stability a nine out of ten. 

I would rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. We have more than eight to nine sites that are covered by the tool. 

The solution's deployment gets completed in less than 15 minutes. 

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. I discussed with the security teams and they consider the tool a state-of-the-art product. 

It is complicated to integrate the solution's on-cloud version with other platforms. 

I have been using the solution for six years.

It is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable. We have 20 applications hosted on its on-premises version and around five applications on mobile infrastructure. A team of three administrators manages the operations.

The solution's technical support is good.

Positive

I have used F5 and Barracuda before. Both solutions are easy to use.

The solution's initial setup is easy and takes two or three days to complete.

We implemented the solution with the help of its reseller.

The solution is stable and easy to manage. I rate it a nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for the solution is securing our applications and customer-facing website.

The Imperva Web Application Firewall feature I have found the most valuable is the ease of deployment. The solution's customer service is good as well. 

The Imperva Web Application Firewall automations are good, but there is still room for improvement with them. Fast rule propagation could also be improved.

My company has been using Imperva Web Application Firewall for four years. But, personally, I have been using it for three years. It was already operational in the organization when I joined. 

We have not had any issues with stability. 

I think Imperva Web Application Firewall is scalable. 

I have had a positive experience with Imperva Web Application Firewall's tech support so far. They are knowledgeable and respond on time. 

Positive

I was not with the company when Imperva Web Application Firewall was initially deployed but I believe the process was straightforward. 

F5 firewalls are clunky and that is why we do not use them. They are good and powerful, but it takes quite a bit to set them up. They are not as easy to set up as Imperva Web Application Firewall.

I would say: take Imperva Web Application Firewall into consideration because of its simplicity.