Share your experience using WAAS

I can see that I am a consultant at a reseller and I am the architect of Cato SASE Cloud Platform designs. In the baseline, I usually recommend Cato SASE Cloud Platform for international companies that have many different setups spread globally.

I think all of the functionalities, such as the secure web gateway feature, are quite good. I also believe Cato SASE Cloud Platform is one of the only solutions that has not only a software firewall solution but also a physical software solution where you can change the company's firewalls and put in sockets from Cato SASE Cloud Platform, which I see as an advantage for them.

The single-pass architecture has improved user experience with Cato SASE Cloud Platform as it provides security teams in companies a platform where they can easily obtain information if there are breaches or security issues.

I assess the benefit of integrating WAN optimization as good. There is ease in making rules between WAN optimization, especially when it comes to global connections because of all their points of presence that are spread over the world.

I think the real-time threat protection of Cato SASE Cloud Platform is also good. Their points of presence are quite efficient, and I do not see any delays in that area.

To improve Cato SASE Cloud Platform, I think they sometimes need more built-in features for security in larger networks when doing local authentication, as they currently leave that to other vendors.

I would have preferred to see more LT 5G connection built into their sockets in the future, which is coming up now and I think that is positive.

I am quite familiar with Cato SASE Cloud Platform networks and I have been working with Cato SASE Cloud Platform for two to three years.

I find Cato SASE Cloud Platform overall stable.

I think the technical support by Cato SASE Cloud Platform is quite good and I would rate their performance an eight out of ten for that area.

Positive

I do not find it particularly expensive, but for some companies, they may not have the budget to be at that level of security for their networks.

If Cato SASE Cloud Platform does not fit the budget, I usually recommend a more on-site solution, such as FortiGate firewalls, or if they would prefer a cloud solution, I would suggest a full Meraki solution with MX Gateways from Meraki.

It is difficult to find types of companies I would not recommend Cato SASE Cloud Platform to, and I believe you can use Cato SASE Cloud Platform in most environments, although there could be some cases where organizations are really cost-sensitive.

I measure the effectiveness of Cato SASE Cloud Platform using metrics such as milliseconds for connections and bandwidth, comparing it with its efficiency to see if it delivers on their bandwidth choices.

I believe that the centralized cloud-native management helps with policy configuration by allowing users to build their own environment without many issues, which is key to going cloud-based. I would rate this review an overall eight out of ten.

We are still working with Cloudflare at my company, bKash Limited, and we continue to use Cloudflare's Cloud WAF solutions and anti-DDoS solutions.

We are using three solutions from Cloudflare. One is their DNS solution. For our on-premises workload at bikash.com, the primary DNS solution for authoritative DNS is Cloudflare's DNS solution. All traffic for the bikash.com domain is routed through Cloudflare's Anycast solution and Anycast IP. We are advertising this through Cloudflare, and Cloudflare protects our web application and API through this solution for our on-premises infrastructure. This represents 40 to 45% of our workload traffic.

We are using Cloudflare's image optimization feature called Turnstile for CAPTCHA. In some of our applications, we were previously using Google reCAPTCHA, but we are now replacing Google reCAPTCHA with Cloudflare's Turnstile solution for DDoS protection.

Cloudflare's WAF features help us address security threats including SQL injection and cross-site scripting because these protections are automated. In other solutions, we use F5 for our distributed cloud for our AWS and other workloads, and we have to configure those solutions manually. With Cloudflare, those are predefined configurations. We do not need to perform any configuration ourselves, and they ensure protections.

Cloudflare's DNS services deliver the best performance in terms of speed and reliability. We are also using AWS Route 53 for bikash.sh, where our 65% workload is located, but we feel more secure with Cloudflare rather than AWS Route 53 for authoritative DNS.

Cloudflare's custom analytics provide insights into user interactions and security vulnerabilities because we receive good information from the security dashboard about where our traffic originates and from which networks we receive the most attacks. These are valuable features, and I would say they are an added advantage from a monitoring perspective.

Their analytical dashboard is comprehensive because they provide substantial information and features that I find valuable.

From a security perspective, there remains a security loophole, as some browsers in the market can bypass the Turnstile solution, which requires approximately 40 seconds to do so. From a performance perspective, this is acceptable. We also tried Google reCAPTCHA, and that can also be bypassed. From a security perspective, I would say neither solution is completely secured.

Regarding uptime, we have faced a couple of incidents due to Cloudflare in recent years, so I cannot say we receive 100% uptime for our region. We sometimes face challenges, including downtime and other issues. As a result, we are not receiving 100% uptime from Cloudflare's solution. Since most of our customers are in this region, we need alternatives. We need something more competitive than Cloudflare. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh, Cloudflare has three points of presence already, and we cannot find any other solution provider in Bangladesh as an alternative, which presents another challenge.

Competitor solutions have more attack signatures, which ensure better security compared to Cloudflare's predefined configurations. Customers do not have options to modify any configuration parameters in Cloudflare, whereas other competitor solutions, such as F5 Distributed Cloud, allow customers to tune configurations according to their requirements. Cloudflare could improve in this area. Additionally, regarding visibility, Cloudflare has static visibility, but they could adopt dynamic graph features for their customers.

We have been using Cloudflare since 2018.

I would rate their technical support as average, neither particularly good nor poor.

Cloudflare's technical support presents challenges. First, because they are dealing with live traffic as an emerging service, their response time should be more consistent. Currently, we use other solutions where support is available through Slack channels and is more interactive, with someone responding within a couple of minutes or seconds. We also see solution providers that offer AI-based responses, providing solutions from their knowledge-based database whenever an issue occurs. Cloudflare operates traditionally with a portal where we must raise a ticket, and an engineer will engage and respond within two to three hours. This is why I rate them as average, and we need more proactive support from Cloudflare.

Neutral

We are also using AWS Route 53 for bikash.sh, where our 65% workload is located.

From an analytical perspective, we are also using DataDog and F5 WAF solutions, all with interactive dashboards. However, Cloudflare only has some predefined dashboard visibility, and the graphs are actually static and not dynamic. Other solutions have dynamic representations, but while Cloudflare provides substantial information, the representation could be much better.

I would recommend Cloudflare to other companies. However, I would recommend F5 XC Distributed Cloud first as my top priority, and then Cloudflare as my second priority.