Akamai vs AWS WAF

Likelihood to Recommend

Akamai is a well-established brand name with a great product. It meets and many time exceeds the needs for global content delivery and security management layer at the edge. Fine grain security tuning seems cumbersome as the definition of the app keeps changing. It also requires an investment of time for the setup which doesn't necessarily make sense for smaller scale scenarios. Some products offered by AWS, Azure or the Google Cloud can be more tightly integrated with cloud provider offerings thus easier to configure.

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Retail Company, 10,001+ employees

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AWS is ideal for implementation in scenarios where business applications are consuming more resources than they should. When AWS WAF is used it prevents this from happening and in this way applications tend to run as they should. It is ideal to establish custom rules and centralize them to protect different applications without having to re-create the same rules which helps save time, as well as allowing the usual attack patterns to be blocked, such as cross-site scripts and SQL injection.

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maría jose gonzalez ortiz

Software Developer

KANA SoftwareComputer Software, 501-1000 employees

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Pros

Very advanced compression algorithms and a global content delivery network.
Sophisticated security features.
On-demand network scalability.
Great dashboard and real-time reporting

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Retail Company, 10,001+ employees

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It allows custom rules to be established to stop attacks that may harm business applications.
Its cost is based only on what the user uses to establish rules that can protect applications from vulnerabilities.
The rules can be established by the user or those that the system already brings with it being able to be centralized to reuse them for the rest of the applications, which saves time.
The user can choose the traffic of their applications.
The cost depends on the number of rules assigned.
It deploys new rules fast and efficiently.

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maría jose gonzalez ortiz

Software Developer

KANA SoftwareComputer Software, 501-1000 employees

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Cons

Really confusing contracts and deceptive billing practices.
Convoluted interface. Difficult to understand what goes where because they use strange naming conventions.
When you ask for support to help with an issue, they always try and get you on a call to demo an upgraded service. Their "support" is really just a glorified sales team trying to get you to upgrade and pay more at every turn.
Many on their support staff do not speak english well enough to convey ideas and concepts in a clear manner.

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Verified User

Executive in Information Technology

Arts and Crafts Company, 51-200 employees

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It is necessary to have knowledge about the software because otherwise inappropriate rules will be created.
Your configuration can be somewhat tedious.
Your support team takes a long time to answer the user's questions.
Its costs can be somewhat high, unlike other services since it is charged by the number of rules that are created.

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Hanna Bedoya

Software Developer

iModulesComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

I haven't had much experience with other CDNs and to be honest I haven't heard of many more other than Akamai which just goes to show which one is the most trusted and proves to be the best. There are others out there, such as CloudFlare, that claim to provide a similar service but there is always something missing that Akamai just already has.

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Adam Rooney

Developer

M and M DirectRetail, 501-1000 employees

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The use of this software was decided on because it is much easier to manage since the rules that are implemented can be specific or centralized. We also like it because you only pay for what you used. Imperva SecureSphere requires a much higher learning curve.

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Hanna Bedoya

Software Developer

iModulesComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Speed up delivery of content and improved user experience for users coming to our website
Save cost as we do not need as many back end servers to run our web instance because majority of load is being handled by Akamai servers

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Health, Wellness and Fitness Company, 5001-10,000 employees

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Our applications are less exposed to cyber attacks, which prevents them from getting out of control and consume much more resources than they should.
Saved us money by preventing attacks.
The traffic control is much more bearable.
App development is safer.

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Hanna Bedoya

Software Developer

iModulesComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Akamai

AWS WAF

Pros

Cons

Alternatives Considered

Return on Investment

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Additional Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

Free/Freemium Version

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Entry-level set up fee?

Additional Pricing Details

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