Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF) vs. Salesforce Agentforce Sales

If you are looking for a cheap product to meet the bare minimum requirements for PCI or any other compliance regulations, this is not the product. Also, the WAF portion only inspects on HTTP/HTTPS traffic which can be very limiting into other forms of web apps that utilize other protocols. The HTTP/HTTPS inspection that it does do is very in depth and well worth the investment.

Incentivized

In the end, I think we can always make it fit — and that’s one of the powers of Salesforce. Because of its flexibility and wide range of possibilities, you can really make it work for almost any need. The key, though, is to make thoughtful decisions upfront and plan carefully how you set it up. If you do that, you’ll end up with a truly flexible and effective system.

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

• It does a good job of routing our leads to customers, to our inside sales reps and teams.
• It does a good job of tracking all of the opportunities that we have, the contacts that we have with people related to the opportunities.
• Organizing and being able to do reports on what our sales are.

Incentivized

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

• I’d say the only thing that can be a bit tricky — and I know Tableau helps address this — is that sometimes we’re limited in how deep we can go with the data in terms of reporting. It would be great to have a bit more robustness within the app itself. However, we’ve figured out our workarounds, and overall, I think it’s a fantastic product — which is why I’ve been working with it for 23 years.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

It's easy and works great. The onboarding process, although easy, can sometimes take too long for SSL and domain validation, but its not a big deal.

Incentivized

All in all, it's a great product that use all day, every day. It's aesthetically pleasing overall and specifically provides information in a clean, concise way. It's easy to manipulate and seems to play well with the other products I use such as Pardot, Gmelius, and our company's proprietary data system. It increases my efficieny in my admin tasks so I have more time to focus on revenue-generation and account management. It's also easy to use from everywhere where it be on a university campus, in a hotel room, one of a million Starbucks, or at home

Incentivized

All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:

Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:

Live and historical data on system performance
Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance
Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats
Best security practices for your organization
Information on how we safeguard your data

For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon

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).

The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

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.

Based on my experience, I’ve used Odoo — it’s an open-source ERP system. It’s not exactly the same as Salesforce or Sales Cloud, but it serves a similar purpose. And I feel that Sales Cloud is better. Personally, I find it easier to use and better than what Odoo offers, especially in terms of customization and achieving business objectives. That’s where Salesforce Sales Cloud really stands out in comparison to Odoo.

Incentivized

It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.

Incentivized

• Our on-prem firewall has less work to do, allowing it more cycles for other tasks.
• We have better web traffic visibility and control over what actors are doing outside our network.

• It helps us achieve our objectives, especially now with Agentforce — we can get more insights to help our sellers sell more. It’s really nice because it’s almost like you can use the standard part of Salesforce to train your agents and teach your sellers how to improve their sales. So that’s really nice.

Incentivized