I recommend Imperva specially if you have a big environment with thousand of websites because of its ease to use and availability. Imperva delivers a reliable solution with great capability to contain cyber attacks and even fraud preventions in some cases. The only scenario it's less appropriate is if your focus is anti fraud instead of a solution to block cyber attacks.
Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.
Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin.
Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow.
Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood.
Attack Correlation Validation - This specific policy produces a lot of false positives as well as the SQL injection policies. Of course it is difficult to tell what a legitimate query is on a public facing web app.
Profiling - I tend to spend more time than any other feature tuning the Web App Profiles. Plugins are used to help cope with this, but on extremely large web apps we are forced to turn off the profiling feature.
The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful.
Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security.
I gave the NetScaler a 7 here because the system once configured and deployed is very easy to use. However, if you did not deploy the system and do not have the fundamental background knowledge then you will have trouble using the product in general. Overall it is a great product and service but does typically require professional services to be deployed.
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).
Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.
I believe there's no comparison as Imperva is a much more reliable and powerfull WAF. AWS WAF lacks of several features Imperva have and is not that simple to configure neither have a clean web console. I consider Imperva WAF a whole superior level of cyber security solution and it's consider to be one of the leader in this segment.
easy to use and setup and reliable. Once the configuration was setup and running this has been really useful and easy to maintain. The other solutions seemed overly complicated and difficult to configure and get up and running with the security that we required
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.
We had this set up before COVID and it saved us. We just added user licenses and scaled out our citrix farm and IT sat back and just monitored users from home.
Scales up and out with ease
Challenging to find NetScaler experts for advanced features you want to enable and use
