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

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.

I will recommend SonicWall depending of the size of the company and the knowledge of the personal is going to administer the firewall. I deploy those in small office settings where manageability was relative non existence.

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

• Content updates are automatic content lists of applications, URLs, virtual threats.
• Great visualization through graphics of traffic and threats.
• One of the best web content filters on the market.

Incentivized

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

• VPN implementation
• Geo block rules

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.

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).

Technical support is a little expensive but it works. Any technical problem or not, SonicWall support helps in solving the problems. The SLA is fast and the service is also cordial, functional, and straight to the point. Support is essential to keep the tool always up-to-date with lists of malware, URLs, attacks, and others.

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.

Both products has their pro and cons. However in term of subscription and pricing for a small office, this offered better ROI as the office didn't want to spend too much and have something relative easy to manage.

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

• More accurate analysis with the best usage reports and graphs
• Reduction of virtual attacks from blocks

Incentivized