Citrix Gateway vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Citrix is used by everyone in our Company globally across departments, and provides a standardized, very clean, rarely-changing launchpad for all the common apps your team may need. It connects to Okta for necessary security. From my understanding, app assignment to users from the back end is also very simple. That being said, while the lack of changes over the years helps with guides and familiarity, Citrix is not without it's flaws that could use updating - apps refusing to open, scheduled app crashing at 12:00pm EST every day, setup being not as streamlined as it could be for new users, ease of use lacking on the desktop app, lack of accessible guides/quick walkthrough of what the platform is upon first login, etc. Overall, I look forward to improvements for Citrix, though overall I appreciate it's simplicity leading to visual ease of navigation.

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.

• allows seamless use of 2-factor authentication for heightened security within the VPN, and lowers risk of an external hack because of it.
• it allows for differing levels of security. access can be set specifically through the VPN so 2 users can use the same site and get different results depending on their active directory security policy.
• It can grant the ability to launch a single application or an entire VPN envelope

Incentivized

• 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

• I suggest make it more faster because sometimes its lagging but not all the time.
• When it comes to Notepad I suggest having options for the size of fonts, and color of fonts, to make it look nicer.
• I suggest making it more user-friendly, and more features so that users can perfectly maximize this tool.

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

Citrix is a visually very clean platform, allowing for ease of use from even the least tech-savvy. That being said, the apps crashes a lot (scheduled or otherwise), and apps very often refuse to open from the dashboard, making for a frustrating/confusing experience from those who have not yet experienced these same issues daily for years now. The launcher app (for MacBook) leaves a lot to be desired in terms of both setup and daily use, making the web version more viable. First-time users are also often confused on what Citrix is - and how each app connects in order to open a program (explaining "log into Citrix on the web, then download the launcher app, then launch the Spectra app via Citrix web, which will open in the Citrix launcher app on your laptop to launch the app, but you have to paste in the URL again and log in again to access" is a handful)

Incentivized

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.

Support is pretty good and pretty fast to respond. I can't say I can really complain about the support experience I've had with them, as they've resolved issues within a reasonable time-frame. Of course, they could always be faster and better, but I think for what we pay, it's well worth the money.

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 chose Citrix Netscaler Gateway for its wide market presence and its great experience over time. Although the implementation time may be longer than in the other solutions, I think the results are better and it allows configuration with greater capacity than the others. The cost is similar in all the solutions seen.

Incentivized

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.

• The largest positive impact was that it provided a path up upgrade from the now defunct CSG Citrix product. Because Netscaler Gateway is an at cost product, where CSG was not, one could argue there is no monetary ROI but the ROI in this scenario comes more from the ability to not have to use a non Citrix product and learn the skills needed to administer it.
• Negative wise, Netscaler Gateway can be quite costly in both upfront costs and maintenance fees. It is part of business and a requirement but when using it as a replacement for CSG you will have to account for several thousands of dollars per year in additional cost.
• Because it can implemented as a virtual server (it comes in both hardware and non hardware versions) the lack of need to add one more piece of hardware to our data center saves in space, up front costs, and power/cooling needs if you opt to go with the software based version.

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