Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Easy to use and reliable, with very little maintenance required and zero downtime to date. For the education sector, ease of use is hugely important as IT Managers/Technicians are often "Jack of all trades" with a good, broad general knowledge but perhaps lacking specific expertise in certain aspects. Being provided with easy-to-follow tutorials and instructions has been very useful in setting up and configuring the firewall, especially as my background is more in desktop support.

Incentivized

Imperva web application firewall does a great job in giving us control over access to our public web servers. With our regular hosting provider, we couldn't block access based on geography, or really anything. So we had to rely on traditional access controls to protect the data. But with the WAF, we can block countries such as North Korea, or we could stop any SQL Injection attempts, or even do a temporary block of IP in the case of detected brute-forcing.

• Attack patterns are regularly updates through contents via Barracuda Web Application Firewall update servers
• Bot Protection has a good line feature to verify between the genuine clients like browsers and bots
• Dos Protection also good level of protection to mitigate Layer 7 attacks
• Allow Deny Rules provides a lot of granular controls to allow and deny the traffic
• URL profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
• Parameter profiles has a very granular control to mitigate false positives
• Risk score feature for the clients to mitigate attacks is also very good feature
• Client fingerprint module can be used against malicious user to enhance security
• Separate XML and JSOn profile for all the URL profiles of the application is plus
• API security is very much effective and shadow API can also be identified

• Alert Aggregation - Correlates different violations into perceived correlated attacks.
• Ease of deployment - as one of the only WAFs that allow bridge mode deployment, this can be deployed with without downtime and no Network Architecture modifications. If the need for proxy is required at a later time, Transparent Reverse Proxy can be deployed within seconds and minimal configuration.
• Custom Policies - Custom security policies are easy to configure.
• Reporting - There are a good amount of pre-configured reports available by default.

Incentivized

• STM crashes sometimes happen due to unusual traffic pattern
• Obfuscation on the client side user credentials which appears in the developer tools of browser
• URL Profiles redundancy during the learning of traffic needs to be fixed
• Dos Protection should be more granular like escalation period to throw JS challenge, Captcha and rate limit when escalation period hits until the WAF stops the attack
• Client Fingerprinting should work as expected when verifying the clients as in rare some scenarios, it creates issues

• The UI can use a little work (but is largely decent)

-User friendly interface for quick learning -Quick deployment for deploying applications -Easy to manage for naive -System components and upgradation of the WAF is very easy go with -Back restoration is very to make it up and ready anytime -Seperate JSON and XmL profiles for each URLs of the application is plus -Amazing and world class support engineer in comparison other vendors and always available to support -Quick resolution on bugs with their patch applying process

There are just a couple of points that are hard to find, that probably could be elsewhere. But these are minor; everything else is right where you'd expect it to be.

The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is easy to use. Support from Barracuda is great also. Load Balancing of the Web Application Firewall is also nice. This allows you to do maintenance or have large loads for the end-user. Threat monitoring of our network and traffic coming into our services within our cloud solution.

Incentivized

We haven't needed support from Imperva since implementation. But during that time, their personnel were very quick to respond to questions. Since then, it's been largely doing its thing for us (which is exactly what we'd hoped).

We have been using their Backup products especially Backup Appliances and legacy products like Intronis. We are also using their Cloud Backup Solutions for O365. This is the reason we opted for this product.

Ultimately, it was the easiest to work with that was still a "known" company (we've been burned too many times by up-and-comers). We needed something that gave us a lot of control but then didn't need its handheld on a daily basis. Imperva gives us a lot of that and we are still able to navigate it with ease.

• Much better response times for remote transactions
• 4 year refresh cycle included with active support contracts
• More expensive than traditional firewalls (however its superior to those, not apples to apples)

Incentivized

• Meet compliance requirements - Check.
• Better Insight into web application - Absolutely great, checks all the traffic against RFC standards and will alert on common development mistakes that duplicate application traffic or provide attack vectors for potential attackers.
• Have had several issues blocking a customer without producing alerts, while it happened only one week out of 2 years of working with the devices, it did produce a lot of headaches.

Incentivized