Radware Cloud WAF Service Reviews

We use the solution to protect our environment against attacks.

I am satisfied with its ability to block unknown threats and attacks.

The Radware Cloud WAF Service is beneficial to our organization because it allows us to unify protection across cloud-based locations and have centralized control over it. Additionally, implementation of the solution is relatively straightforward if the web application is not overly complex.

I think we still need to analyze exactly how much the solution has helped reduce false positives. However, the estimate doesn't have as many false positives. The solution provides accurate signatures for most of the operating systems, and protections. I believe it is quite effective in reducing false positives as we can filter, we have detailed security reviews with the policy security reviews from the previous year and prior day implementation with the experts from Radware. The policies that are set are quite good and there are not as many false positives. We have seen around a 20 percent reduction in the number of false positives.

When the solution works flawlessly it frees up around ten percent of our IT people's time to work on other areas.

Compared to other solutions, the protection against the tax provided by Radware Cloud WAF Service is the same except we now have fewer false positives.

Radware Cloud WAF Service has several valuable features, with good support and a user-friendly GUI. There are some advanced rules that can be useful for reconfiguring complex applications, though not always. Advanced tools are also available.

The automated analytics of the solution is beneficial for examining events. We can traverse security events, extract the necessary information, and search for specific ones.

If the applications are not too complex, integrating the solution with other systems and applications in our environment is easy. However, if they have custom services ports and other components beyond the HCT protocols, then we may have a problem.

The connection between the front and back ends could be improved. The connection is not always accurate, and there are occasional bugs. Radware should consider introducing more advanced tools than the larger ones, as well as providing use cases within the documentation for more advanced rules such as client certificate authentication.

I have been using the solution for seven months.

The solution is stable.

The technical support is responsive.

Neutral

We previously used on-prem solutions and switched to Radware Cloud WAF Service because of the cloud capabilities.

The initial setup is straightforward as long as the applications do not have any custom ports and more services or applications are relatively basic and exposed on the outside without additional services.

A full deployment with security policies and complete implementation requires around three weeks.

I am the one who can operate everything on the cloud, but we need to obtain signatures from a number of people in order to change the IP addresses. The deployment requires one person from the IT security team and five or more people from the business side.

The return on investment is satisfactory and has stabilized at this point.

The price is a bulk average.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution's time to value is average. Sometimes bugs arise and take longer than expected, and sometimes everything goes smoothly. I would say the ratio is 50/50. When everything goes smoothly with the integration the value is seen immediately.

The solution has been deployed across multiple locations in six different countries.

It has required some maintenance a few times but not much.

We have 30 people using the solution.

I would recommend the solution; however, it is always beneficial to have a proof of concept first. You should go through the demo to ensure the solution fits their environment.

Our company does collections of debt and we have a number of public websites. We usually send emails or snail mail to the clients and they reach us through any of our three of our main sites. Because those sites are exposed to the internet, we use the web application firewall from Radware to protect them. It protects us from attacks like denial service, SQL injections, et cetera. It is an application-oriented firewall for everything that is exposed over the internet.

On the InfoSec side, it helps us to know who is trying to access our site but is not legitimate. The protection against low and slow DDoS attacks is helpful because they are another way that malicious actors try to get into our system.

Also, with Radware Cloud WAF, we have reduced our security headcount. Before we had it, we had to have at least one person going over all the elements of our firewall and fine-tune it against whatever attacks and elements were there. Now, that position is no longer needed because we can receive reports. We went from having almost daily conversations about elements that we were seeing in our firewall, to just presenting monthly reports of what we were protected against to senior management. We go in through Radware to the dashboard and get the information.

They do have an API for getting reports and we are in the middle of trying to get those reports automated. But, for the time being, everything is on the really nice and well-organized dashboard that we use for those executive reports. By the end of the month, we will actually have executive reports that go to our senior level.

Also, if Radware finds some sort of a legitimate attack, they actually call us, like a SOC would, and report it to us.

Another benefit is that it has reduced our false positives. Usually, we would have five to eight in a week. We're down to almost one a month. That's impressive. We were doing reactive fine-tuning, whereas this is more of an AI and machine-learning implementation, which is way better. Each of those false positives we used to have required between 10 minutes and almost an hour from us. In the worst-case scenario, we were putting in one hour daily on false positives, or 20 hours monthly.

The isolation feature is the most important one because everything is going directly to Radware first and then it goes into our system. What we get is the filtered version of everything that would otherwise come directly to us.

For blocking unknown threats and attacks, it uses machine learning. It actually learns what is normal traffic from clients. Once we got the solution, they asked us to open all requests to do some type of machine learning to understand what normal traffic is. With other elements that Radware has in its arsenal, it can differentiate between normal, human traffic and bots or even DDoS attacks.

And we haven't had any false positives so far from the solution's automated analytics. On top of that, it's a very good tool because we can actually see the locations that traffic is coming from, and we can prohibit it from very specific areas of the world. One thing we have learned is how to optimize some of our code to make the application faster. The solution can react to attacks from different parts of the world and block them from entering our servers.

We also use the API Discovery feature and the analysis of the contents of the API is very good. Because we are PCI-certified, we usually use external penetration tests and obfuscation of malicious code through API, and what is discovered by Radware, and blocked, is very impressive. It won't allow any callbacks unless they are from our IP. It also offers VPN connectivity that we are testing, to provide end-to-end protection. What it comes down to is that no one reaches out to our server that is publicly exposed; that exposure is only to Radware. We like that.

It's easy to use the API Discovery, but you must know what you're doing. You just enable it but there are some elements that you need to provide to Radware. The only downside there is the learning process on the Radware side. You need to run it without any filters so it can actually see what normal traffic is and then it can apply the protection.

In terms of integrating Radware Cloud WAF Service with the other systems and applications, everything is API-connected so it was really easy. There is a testing period and, in one case, it took us 90 days, but in another, it was only two weeks. But it integrates really well with our systems.

There is a learning curve for the API for reporting. It is not as easy as other APIs.

Also, the implementation was hit or miss for the first few months. They did some tweaking and, since then, there have been no problems. 

Another issue is that they don't go back into information beyond 90 days. We have to pull the information so we can have, let's say, a year of threats, attacks, and data to help us make decisions about providing more or fewer resources, depending on the year-long data.

I have been using Radware Cloud WAF Service since 2019.

The stability is good. There was one instance of downtime but it was basically our systems.

We haven't needed to scale, for the moment. But I know on their side that they have a huge number of denial-of-service attacks and we haven't had any feedback from our clients about not being able to reach our website. So the solution is working. I don't know how they scale it because, with a DDoS attack, if you don't know how to treat it, you will need to scale it so you can actually allow safe users into your system.

Our number of users is more than 5,000 with two locations. The number of people involved in the Cloud WAF project, on our team plus the networking team, is about 10.

Tech support is ticket-based. We have a 24-hour SLA that they have committed to, but we are more into having communication directly with them. Even though they have the ticket system and ask us to create tickets, we usually reach out to our contacts and try to expedite support requests.

Positive

We were using Cisco Firepower as our main firewall, but that is not a web application firewall. We switched to Radware Cloud WAF because we evaluate our InfoSec roadmap every year. Based on the capabilities that Radware offered, and on recommendations from each year's pen test, and because we are trying to evolve our security to make it more mature, it was the decision that we took. It was a good one.

The deployment is hybrid. There are elements that go to AWS and elements that go to our co-location services in Jacksonville. Eventually, everything is going to be exclusively cloud-based.

We are currently migrating everything to AWS. Setting things up, at that moment in time, was kind of hectic, but that was more because of our side. What Radware asked us to do was to redirect everything into our DNS, so it was fairly in terms of what their side needed. It was more an issue of understanding how we could tweak the solution on our side. With the planning included, it took less than a month.

In terms of maintenance, it mostly just works. But from time to time, based on the changes that we make to our web application code, we need to tweak some of the settings of the web application firewall.

Everything was in-house and we had four people involved.

Imagine those 20 hours we used to spend on false positives multiplied by the employees' salaries and you have an ROI. I can't tell you if the ROI takes less than a year or two years, but this solution is one of our main layers of defense and it is a requirement for everything we do.

The pricing is fair. We compared Radware to others using industry reviews and Radware is at the top right now.

Radware Cloud WAF is way better than what we had. It's more self-sufficient. When we used the regular firewall, we were the ones trying to build up the different signatures and create some sort of access control list based on location. And there was no API filtering. It is a night and day change.

My main advice would be to include the development team, because the adoption of really good API-based protection is going to happen by having really good communication with your development team. They actually consume some of the rules that we use to create those APIs, and they pass that to their machine-learning processes. That's what is going to customize the web application firewall for your environment. 

We use the solution to protect our main public application for transportation tickets. We have the product in the cloud set up before our infrastructure, so there is no need to integrate it as if it were an appliance etc.  

Most importantly, the solution put our security team at ease. We previously had some other infrastructure to protect our servers, but having Radware in the cloud gives us confidence.

The tool helped free up our IT team for other projects and saved us significant time. It eased our workload, allowing us to work in other areas. Overall, the time savings are in the region of 10-15%.

Cloud WAF helped to reduce our false positives; we initially had a lot, but once we learned, we had very few. The solution reduced our false positives by about 80%.  

The solution requires very little maintenance; we install it, it works without any problems, is reliable, and we can almost forget about it.

Radware Cloud WAF works very well to block unknown threats and attacks; we set up some products and infrastructure beyond the solution, and they aren't detecting any threats.   

The tool's automated analytics work fine for looking at events; the fact is, we're preparing to renew our license for another three years. 

The primary area for improvement is in issue detection and understanding whether a log is a false positive. It can sometimes be a challenge to take the data of a given security event and determine if it's a genuine threat using a Wiki etc.

Navigating to find specific options can sometimes be challenging, but we only do this occasionally; we primarily control the logs, so it's not particularly significant for us.

We had some issues with the initial implementation, especially around tuning the solution to avoid false positives. 

I've been using the solution for three to four years. 

The solution was relatively unstable during the first year, and we encountered issues, but after that, it was very stable.

The technical support is excellent; they ask questions, and on rare occasions, they haven't been able to help us. However, they looked into the issues on these occasions and provided a solution a few months later.

Positive

Radware Cloud WAF is the first WAF solution we've used.

The initial setup was relatively complex; we had some DNS certificate issues, and the deployment took much longer than we expected. However, the second implementation was straightforward and much faster. We experienced DNS issues again, but we had the benefit of experience.

The initial deployment took a few weeks and was carried out by two staff members. We outsourced the solution's management to a civil security team of around ten members.

The product is excellent in terms of ROI because it has saved us a lot of time.

The pricing is fair; it's neither particularly cheap nor expensive.

I rate the solution eight out of ten, and I recommend it.

We have seen time to value with Cloud WAF, and we saw this value after around three months. Once we tuned the application to avoid false positives, we started to see a return on our investment.  

We don't currently use the API Discovery feature but plan to implement it soon.