Imperva Application Security Platform Reviews and Pricing

it_user279876

IT Manager with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 28, 2015

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Because of the load balance functionality, our site is available despite attacks.

What is most valuable?

DDOS defence
Load balancing
Security role

How has it helped my organization?

The availability of our sites, thanks to the load balance functionality, has improved. It enables the site to be available all the time, despite people trying to attack it.

What needs improvement?

More features to help fine tune it. In general, more features for the platform would be nice.

For how long have I used the solution?

I’ve used it for two to three years.

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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

I used the customer service once.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Once or twice, there has been downtime, but it was only a matter of minutes.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

It was pretty high quality service. They guarantee to fix your problem within 15 minutes, but they don’t always keep their word.

Technical Support:

They are professional people who provide solutions.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

No previous solution used.

How was the initial setup?

It was very simple.

What about the implementation team?

It was done in-house.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price is between $5,000 and $10,000.

What other advice do I have?

The product experience is really easy, therefore you should go and experience it.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.

it_user277947

Online Marketing Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jul 28, 2015

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The user-generated spam stopped after we started using it to speed up and protect our website.

What is most valuable?

Their WAS - I had a problem and I turned to Incapsula. I needed someone to protect the website and they succeeded in this regard.

How has it helped my organization?

We’re not an e-commerce site, but a website for providing information, and we needed someone to protect the website. The user-generated spam stopped after we started using Incapsula, and so we feel more secure.

What needs improvement?

I needed some support and according to the SLA and I couldn’t get telephone support and it took a little while till they got back to me. We’re an enterprise company so I think I would be happier for a bit more support to pick the phone up and ask a question. There was not as much back office help as we would have liked.

For how long have I used the solution?

I’ve used it for four months.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Yes, we had some down time but we solved it. It took us a few hours although we were promised no down time.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues with stability, but I still have to look into whether the site speed was faster than it was before as promised.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues with scalability.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

8/10 – very professional.

Technical Support:

8/10 – very professional once they got back to me.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I didn’t use any other solution.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It’s not costly for my needs.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I knew the solutions available in the market because I was working in a cyber-security company. I suggested the product, because I knew the product and that they are better than other solutions for my needs.

What other advice do I have?

Do it on a Sunday in case there is down time. I would ask for support after implementation, and check that the site speed is as fast as it should be.

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September 2025

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it_user277953

ICT Director with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 28, 2015

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We've had no compromises to our website and services from potential threats, hackers, etc. as the Web Application firewall has been effective.

What is most valuable?

The Web Application firewall is a valuable feature as the security features are mostly what we're interested in.

How has it helped my organization?

We hope that the product helps protect us from potential threats, hackers etc. that compromise our website and services. We want peace of mind. The fact that nothing has occurred is a good thing.

What needs improvement?

We’ve had a few, short outages that didn't have an impact on the business. One outage lasted a couple of hours, so the reliability could be improved.

At times, we can prove the service is not running, but technical support doesn’t reflect that fact. We appreciate that nothing is 100% reliable, but we'd appreciate more information during an outage and not after the fact.

Also, reporting could be improved. We shouldn’t have to look on Twitter to see if others are experiencing a similar issue. Greater transparency is needed when there is an issue.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for about two years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues at all.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have had a few outages.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues on that front as we haven’t needed to scale it.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Average to poor.

Technical Support:

Average to poor.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Yes, we used Barracuda. The product was not difficult to configure but it didn’t work well. There was high latency in the product.

How was the initial setup?

It was straightforward.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Cost is OK. It’s more expensive than CloudFlare and Amazon but it’s got better features. We are happy with the price, its just the information and reliability, otherwise we would be happy to give a glowing recommendation.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We looked at CloudFlare, but they don’t offer the same security features. Incapsula was selected because of the uniqueness of the security features.

What other advice do I have?

I think it’s a leading product, a market leader; that’s how it feels to us. But I don’t think it would be a good product if i'ts mission critical. You'd need to proceed with a certain amount of caution because we haven’t had 100% uptime.

it_user71820Works at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Aug 3, 2015

Regarding transparency - checkout status.incapsula.com

it_user259980

Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 24, 2015

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The GUI could be improved a little, but the profiling section is the most valuable and fresh aspect about SecureSphere.

Valuable Features

I really like the profiling section. I mean that signature based policies are ok and they are maybe the most widespread and common kind of security policy in security appliances, but, the profiling policies are custom tailored on a specific web application. I guess it’s the most valuable, and fresh, aspect about SecureSphere.

Improvements to My Organization

It has helped a lot with working among, and creating a link between, different teams in my organization, of course I’m referring to security, networking and system application teams. It’s important to find the right collaboration in order to secure the applications from the beginning of the deployment process.

Room for Improvement

I guess the GUI could be improved a little, as it’s not always simple to get. The most important aspect to me that needs improvement though, is that, by default, if you put activate and protect a server group you created, all the web applications lying on the same group of physical machines, inherit the same policy rule set. This means it’s not so easy to different policies and cut them on a specific application (maybe I’ll ask the vendor support).

Use of Solution

It’s been one-and-a-half years.

Deployment Issues

Not in particular, once I understand the network behavior and the different types of the WAF deployment it was pretty simple and fast.

Stability Issues

Not so far. It must be said, though, that It’s a relatively a new installment in our infrastructure, and maybe it’s too soon to say.

Scalability Issues

It’s an ongoing process day to day, working alongside systems and application engineers to adapt the WAF to better meet the applications characteristics. I guess it depends a lot on the application features and software implementation.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Customer Service:

I would say that they are pretty available.

Technical Support:

They are reliable and ready to solve your issues.

Initial Setup

To be honest, we have been supported by a professional services engineer who showed us the peculiarities during the initial setup, so it was a good experience. I would say that it’s straightforward if you are in good hands.

Other Advice

I would say to focus on the most convenient area for positioning the WAF in order to take the get the best out of it. In my case, we chose a WAF appliance, and it’s crucial where to put it. For instance, we chose to deploy it downstream from the load balancing network infrastructure for various reasons. One of them was to enable the WAF to see the private IP addresses that a vulnerability assessment tool in the private DMZ would see in order to use the WAF as an application firewall and as a virtual patching tool either.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user270024Works

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Jul 9, 2015

This review was helpful because you took the time to write it.

it_user257100

Founder and Team Head at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jun 17, 2015

Overall it worked well without any glitches.

I’ve been using Incapsula CDN for about a month now, So I’d thought to write down a review about my experience. The loading time of a site is important, quite important. The loading time comes among various factors used for ranking a site, With site speed getting so much buzz around the town, your site/blog needs to be quick to be ranked high. The site loading time should be as minimum as possible, this not only makes your site loved by users and bots but also increases your conversion rates.

When decreasing your site load speed time, you have to look along several factors, the list of which includes things as easy as optimizing images to as complicated as combining CSS and JS files, the list includes several other things too. One thing which can make your life easier while optimizing your site for speed is to use a CDN ( Content Delivery Network ) It is a system of distributed servers (network) that deliver webpages and other Web content to a user based on the geographic locations of the user, the origin of the webpage and a content delivery server. This decrease your site load time, and in addition to this most of the CDN’s provide you a one check option for minimizing HTML, CSS, JS etc.

I’ve now been with Incapsula CDN for about a month now, Before this I used Cloudflare for some time. But lets stick to Incapsula only. About Incapsula CDN : Like most of the CDNs around the web, this CDN is also paid. The good thing is it has a trial version, by deducting some of the features they allow you to use their CDN for Free. The premium account ( Of course paid, contains all the features ).

After you create an account, add your site and make the necessary changes, and log-in to your account. The very first page which would appear would be “My sites” page displaying your websites. Click on your site’s URL and tab with your traffic stats open up. The traffic stats displaying are different when compared to Google analytics or any other plugin. The tab like one displayed above will appear. The Real time traffic feature as displayed is for paid users only.

For unleashing the max speed, you need your content to be optimized. The large CSS and JS coding should be minimized and so is with the HTML too. Using a plugin for this purpose can be an option, but Incapsula provides an in-built option too. You just need to go to the settings > performance and check in the options like the snapshot in the left.

Before we continue, let me tell you my previous stats for an easy comparison. I have this blog hosted on a shared host with usual features offered. Initially my blog’s loading time was 5 sec ( Because I didn’t had much content ) but after using several themes, plugins and publishing some posts the margin increased to 11 sec, this was quite hurting, for readers as well as my rankings. So I decided to use a CDN, and the results after using the Incapsula CDN are :

After using the CDN, my gtmetrix report stats the following, the page speed grade being 93%, Yslow grade 85% and B in loading time. It is overall much convincing comparing the fact that they were quite below this margin before. I tested it on Gtmetrix three times and then thought to test it on pingdom tools. The test revealed that my site speed dropped down to 3 seconds from 11 seconds and 84/100 grade. So, this explains how useful is the Incapsula CDN if you care about the speed of your site/blog.

Final words : I was pretty much convinced by the Incapsula CDN, Overall it worked well without any glitches or breaking down the theme or stylesheet of my blog. I suggest the use of Incapsula’s CDN on your blog/site to decrease your site load time and increase your conversation rates.

So, how has your Incapsula experience been ?

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user257100Founder and Team Head at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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Jun 21, 2015

Because I wrote it ;)

it_user255885

Senior Security Analyst at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Jun 17, 2015

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We can quickly see the attacks that the environment is suffering and take action to mitigate the threat(s).

Valuable Features

I was involved in the deployment and found that all the features in this product are fantastic, especially the correlated attack validation, threat radar (reputation, fraud), and virtual patching. Those are features that are very useful in day to day operations.

Improvements to My Organization

Using WAF in an organization means we can quickly see the attacks that the environment is suffering and take action to mitigate the threat(s). It is possible to view traffic and analyze it to determine if it is legitimate traffic or not, using features such as threat radar and geolocation, helping the security team in the company.

Use of Solution

I've been using the WAF component for over a year.

Deployment Issues

I had no issues with deployment.

Stability Issues

I had no issues with stability.

Scalability Issues

I had no issues with scalability.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Customer Service:

I didn't use the customer service, but all the teams in Imperva have a deep knowledge about the product to support customers for any issues they have.

Technical Support:

The technical support team at Imperva have a deep knowledge of all their solutions, and they are ready to support any customer with any problem.

Initial Setup

The initial setup is different for each environment. You need knowledge of the environment and application, to make a good schedule of activities. Make sure you validate the requirements, and the setup will be simpler to do

Implementation Team

I work as a System Engineer and part of my role is to help the partners do deployments for our customers. I participated in some deployments, and I can say the partners I have worked with have good knowledge about deployment and support for all solutions.

Other Advice

All products are good, and I believe narrowing the choice of manufacturer is best done when you do proof of concepts in-house and you can see which of your choices is best matched to your needs.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user11580

Director of eCommerce with 51-200 employees

May 1, 2014

Incapsula provides enterprise-grade security and acceleration to our customers at an affordable price

We currently host over 1,100 websites and our clients include some of Australia's best known online retail success stories and its largest eBay trader. The nature of the e-commerce business poses a wide range of challenges that we need to deal with on a daily basis in order to keep our clients' online stores up and running. For our clients, time is (literally) money and it’s our responsibility to make sure that all potential problems are handled quickly, before they affect any business transactions.

Security is obviously an issue we couldn’t afford to ignore. We spent several months searching for a solution that could meet our clients' demanding security and performance requirements. As it happened, Incapsula had just opened a new data center in Australia, so we decided to give them a try as well. Their cloud-based service won us over - hands down.

To help companies out there facing similar issues, I wanted to share five key factors that influenced our decision to implement Incapsula.

1. Reseller Support and Integration Options Integration of new services can be difficult, both from marketing and technology standpoints. Thankfully, Incapsula provided plenty of options, including a cPanel integration and an extremely user-friendly API with interesting reseller-oriented capabilities.

While reviewing these tools, we came up with a lot of integration ideas. We batted these ideas back and forth with Incapsula's responsive support team and came back impressed with their ability to provide quick and complete answers to our questions.

Integration always takes time. While we are still working on ours, we know that having the right tools is half the battle. Having the right support makes the other half just a matter of time.

2. Comprehensive Security The commercial potential of e-commerce sites makes them a lucrative target for an ever-growing array of threats, from code-based vulnerabilities to DDoS attacks. Accordingly, we understand that our clients require reliable security solution, to protect their hosted sites from all types of threats and keep things running as smooth as possible.

We also know that by taking on more merchants and increasing our total web presence we increase the likelihood of becoming a target. For fast growing hosting platforms, where multiple sites used shared resources, this is a serious issue. After all, the entire server is only as strong as its "weakest link," and one unprotected site can cause substantial collateral damage to our clients, as well as to our own brand reputation and business goals.

For that reason it was important for us to have a comprehensive solution that helps us cover all bases. With its PCI compliant WAF, DDoS protection and bot filtering technologies, Incapsula helps us do just that – protecting our clients from targeted and automated cyber threats. Today, as Incapsula gets adopted by more and more of our clients, the result is a continual improvement in the resilience of our entire hosted community.

3. No Sweat PCI Compliance PCI compliance is a must for our e-commerce clients so it was important for us to know that Incapsula’s WAF is certified by the PCI Security Standards.

Anyone that ever dealt with PCI DSS knows about the dreaded 6.6 requirement. Incapsula meets these specifications with ease, by providing a PCI-compliant WAF for a ridiculously small fraction of the usual price. Basically, it offers a $60 solution to a problem that can easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to address.

4. Great Value at a Price Your Clients Can Afford To ensure that our clients would benefit from these added-value services, they had to be affordable. Otherwise, no one would sign up. Incapsula's "economy of scale" pricing model made this possible.

As mentioned, the WAF alone would cost somewhere between $10,000 -$30,000, before man-hours and maintenance fees. Incapsula's bundled service also includes a CDN, dynamic caching, DDoS protection and other features, making it a highly attractive and cost-effective solution for commercial sites.

This combination of top-tier technology and mid-market prices makes Incapsula a perfect fit for our merchant clients and still allows us to retain a good reseller margin. Incapsula’s security and performance services also enhance the value of our overall offering, improving our client acquisition and retention to further increase our bottom line.

5. A Partner Who's Got Your Back Most importantly, it's very assuring to know that our own internal team is always backed up by a team of security and networking experts. Incapsula's technical, support and marketing teams have been extremely responsive, reliable and flexible. They worked with us through the initial roll out, and were quick to handle a few minor teething issues, even making changes to their standard system to meet our needs.

Having a partner who goes the extra mile means a lot and really reinforces our trust, both in the technology itself and in the people behind the technology.

Disclosure: PeerSpot has made contact with the reviewer to validate that the person is a real user. The information in the posting is based upon a vendor-supplied case study, but the reviewer has confirmed the content's accuracy.

it_user12231

Owner at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

May 1, 2014

Speed up WordPress – increase security

In a nutshell this is what Incapsula does:

Incapsula offers state-of-the-art security and performance to websites of all sizes. Through a simple DNS change, your website’s traffic is seamlessly routed through Incapsula’s globally-distributed network of high-powered servers. Incoming traffic is intelligently profiled in real-time, blocking even the latest web threats: from sophisticated SQL injection attacks to scrapers, malicious bots, intruding comment spammers and thwarting multi-Gigabit DDoS attacks. Meanwhile, outgoing traffic is accelerated and optimized with Incapsula’s global CDN, for faster load times, keeping welcome visitors speeding through.

I’ve always been interested in how to make my website faster but with the news about brute force attacks on WordPress, I wanted a more secure website as well. Researching WordPress security, I was surprised to find the following image from Incapsula on what sort of traffic you actually get.

I don’t know how accurate this study is, I would like to see more data but I was surprised to say the least. I didn’t know just how much bandwidth could be wasted by automated services on your website.

So I decided to try Incapsula to see what it could do for my website and try and show you through this Incapsula review, just what this product can do.

But what can Incapsula do against all of this? A much easier way of answering this would be to watch their promo video

Install IncapsulaThe installation was pretty easy and within 5 mins I was done. All that is required is to change your DNS records, you can see more about the setup here. For WordPress users it’s also advised for you to install their WordPress plugin.

By using this plugin you will have no change to your originating IPs when using Incapsula. Incapsula acts as a reverse proxy and all incoming connections to your website first pass through one of Incapsula’s servers. This plugin will ensure that you continue to see the real originating IP of your website visitors.

Once this is all setup, it’s just a waiting game for Incapsula to start collecting the data.

Inside Incapsula

inside-incapsula

Once the DNS changes have been made and Incapsula has had time to do its job, you’ll see an image like above when you log in. This is a 7 day run down of what has been going on with your website. As you can see my bot visits out-number the human visits by quite some way.

Not all bots are bad however, I need Google-bot in order for my website to be found as well you a large number of other good bots but Incapsula reports that in the last 7 days there’s been 158 bad bots on my website!

Incapsula security

To test the security of Incapsula, I deleted my Askimet plugin as Incapsula can handle comment bots and protect me from spam. I also let it run for 7 days to see what it would report. Here’s my 7 day run down of what happened on my website.

Going further into the Incapsula dashboard you get a run down of the top attacking countries with USA being my top one with 30% next is China with 20%.

Incapsula also gives you a run down of the types of threats to your website.

threats

So it’s clear that bots are my biggest problem and Incapsula also shows what type of bot is causing the most problems, in my case it’s the comment spammer with 94%. I did want to test just how good Incapsula was so I deleted my Askimet plugin. Considering the amount of comment spammer bots visting my websites, Incapsula does a very good job of protecting my website. Although I still get a couple of spam comments a day without Askimet, I’m still impressed with Incapsula.

comment-spammer

Incapsula will also email you when there’s a threat. This is an email I got yesterday when someone tried to login to my website. Incapsula blocked the request.

This image is also provided by incapsula showing the top client applications. It surprising just how many bots are out there on the Internet!
bots2

To get a better idea of bot vs humans, Incapsula provides you with the following image. This is a nice example of just how much of your bandwidth is being wasted with unwanted bots on your website.

bots

Incapsula speed

Not only does Incapsula do a pretty god job of protecting your website but it also increases the speed of it. By blocking unwanted bots and saving your bandwidth, it not only saves you resources and money but you also get to use their CDN for a faster website.

So I wanted to test the speed of Incapsula, I switched to advanced performance and tested the before and after. The results are below.

Before advanced

After advanced

According to Pingdom switching to advanced performance on Incapsula increased the speed of my website by just over 50%!

You can also see the response time of the CDN location centers.

response-time

With the advanced setting of Incapsula it also caches dynamic cotent which you can read about here. There’s also a good article on how a CDN can help your SEO by Incapsula.

I’ve been impressed with Incapsula, it not only protects me from spammers and bad bots but it has also increased the speed of my website by over 50%. I found Incapsula very easy to use and once the setup is done everything is done automatically for you leaving you with a peace of mind of a faster website with better security.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user1020Head of Data Center at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Nov 21, 2013

A very good review of the product with matching graphics and stats to prove it. This is really something worth considering for anyone operating a high-traffic site, and I would definitely like to implement this for our university web services.