What is our primary use case?
At my previous workplace in the banking sector, we used Imperva WAF for the monitoring of our internet banking traffic, and we also used Imperva's DAM for the database activity monitoring.
Our deployment of Imperva WAF was situated on-premises and it was in use throughout the whole organization, which included around 3,500 clients.
How has it helped my organization?
Imperva Web Application Firewall has improved security of my organization through enhanced visiblity as well protecting malicious IPs, applications and unknown users as well.
What is most valuable?
The WAF itself has been very valuable to me because it has such a complete range of features. Another reason why I like it is because it also takes care of the total overview of the traffic over the network.
What needs improvement?
Imperva's product is very good, but when it comes to procuring the software in my country it can be somewhat expensive. I don't recall the exact amount, but in comparison with other countries it is a huge investment.
They recently separated the WAF and the DAM management gateways in order for each of these to be managed from different areas, so I believe it now requires additional investments for what was previously a single complete solution.
Although the vendor support from Imperva is not bad, getting a response from them can be a lengthy process at times.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Imperva WAF for about three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is mature enough, in my experience. In fact, I would give it a 5/5 for stability.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability-wise, there is one issue we encountered that I want to mention. At some point, Imperva, moved their account takeover prevention features from the on-premises edition to the cloud-based edition, and we discovered that this step would take yet another integration, seeing that we were using Imperva on-premises. These account takeover prevention features, however, were already part of our subscription, but since the features moved to the cloud, we missed out on them. So, in this sense, I would say the scalability strategy isn't as solid as it should be, and for this reason I would rate the scalability a 3.5/5.
On the other hand, when it comes to how many users we were able to scale up to, we actually had the whole organization using it, including around 3,500 clients in total.
How are customer service and support?
The support from the vendor side could be improved because their response times weren't great and the process of obtaining the proper support was a long process sometimes. That said, the support itself was not bad.
How would you rate customer service and support?
How was the initial setup?
The setup was actually quite an advanced process. It was a good experience, but all in all it took about one year to get everything fully set up, when you take all the fine-tuning activities and such into account.
What about the implementation team?
We deployed the Imperva WAF with the help of organizations in South Africa who acted as consultants and implementation partners for Imperva. Our experience with them was good, and the full implementation required two professionals from the consultant's side and about five people from our own organization. The vendor itself was not part of the implementation process.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is somewhat expensive. It is actually a huge investment when compared to other countries.
Not only that, but Imperva went on to separate the WAF and DAM management gateways, making it so that each would have to be managed and licensed separately, incurring the cost of additional investments.
On a related note, there was another licensing issue we encountered where we had a subscription for account takeover prevention features, but these features had been moved by Imperva from the on-premises instance to the cloud. Since we had not moved to the cloud at that point, we did not have access to these features anymore.
What other advice do I have?
I can highly recommend Imperva WAF for financial institutions. It's a good solution and I think it's important for financial institutions, particularly those who conduct online banking, to make use of a solid WAF such as this.
I would rate Imperva WAF a nine out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
*Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.