Imperva DDoS Reviews

• Extensive cache control like cache purging and cache rule propagation
• Availability features
• Cross-datacenter solution (active and passive environments)
• CDN and DDoS protection with 24/7 support

Automatic failover between primary and secondary sites enables high availability and accelerates disaster recovery. As soon as it detects that the primary site has gone down, it automatically kick-starts our standby data center.

The dashboard is not accessible on occasion. This is probably due to a high load. However, the sites’ protection seems intact.

We have been using this solution for four years.

There are no stability issues as of now.

There are no scalability issues, but the custom SSL has a terrible price point that puts it out of range for our clients. If they need custom or EV SSL, they are paying significantly more than their overall hosting.

The technical support is impressive.

We used Akamai previously, but due to full PCI DSS compliance, we needed a proprietary solution for two-factor authentication. We then switched to Incapsula.

The setup was so straightforward. It didn’t require to us to make any major changes.

If you don't have custom SSL, get it!

We switched to Incapsula from Akamai.

Imperva has a very impressive core feature set. Imperva has made security analysts scratch their heads. We allow them in from the inside so they can actually hit something worthwhile.

We are very confident in the reports we get from Imperva. Its bot identification has allowed us to plan bandwidth appropriately.

Identification for good bots (people who hit our site using automation, but for good business reasons) has allowed us to work with our customers who use our services in new ways.

We use Imperva DDoS for DDoS protection and security.

Imperva DDoS is fairly stable, and its availability is quite high. I haven't faced any downtime or system instability issues with the solution.

Imperva DDoS does not provide version control. After I make any changes on any portal, I would want to roll back my changes and go back to a stable version if something goes wrong. That particular feature is not there on the UI portal.

They have this roundabout way wherein I can use different tools to integrate, do the versioning, and manage it on my own. It's not directly available, but I can use it indirectly.

I have been using Imperva DDoS for two to three years.

Imperva DDoS is a scalable product.

The solution's initial setup is a bit difficult and not very easy. It's not that time-consuming if you have expertise. Once you get your hands on it, it's pretty straightforward.

Imperva DDoS is deployed on-cloud in our organization.

I would recommend Imperva DDoS to users because it's a fairly stable product.

Overall, I rate Imperva DDoS an eight out of ten.

We use it to protect websites against application threats and DDoS attacks. Because it is a cloud solution, we always have the last version. I don't need to update or upgrade. 

We are a partner of Imperva. Imperva doesn't sell directly to customers, so they have to pass through vendors and partners like us. All of my customers have different levels of services with Imperva.

We can protect our customers with Imperva solution very quickly, it's highly appreciated by our customers.  We trust the solution because we saw a lot of blocked attacks, so once the customer website is protected, we don't worry about the security of his acces, it's all managed by the solution.

-WAF protection works almost out-of-the-box

-Anti-DDoS mitigation in less than 1s, I saw it many time in production, I can say it works

-CDN has high performances, and the Smart Caching mode is really "smart" (you can do some efficient caching even if you're not a specialist)

-It's a unique interface for managing security and performance aspects, we don't need to go through multiples providers to manages these aspects.

The weakest point of Imperva is their first level of support, which should be improved. 

They should also improve the access and security logs viewing directly on the portal. I would like to see better access and security logs through the portal and not only through a SIEM solution. Currently, if you want to explore your access and security logs from Imperva, you need a SIEM tool or a SIEM infrastructure on your side to do it. You can't do it manually or directly through the portal, which is a big problem for us. They agreed that this is an improvement point from their side.

I have been using this solution for four years.

It is very stable. I have used this solution for more than 20 customers, and each customer has a lot of websites. I have seen some network outages or things like that over the last four years, but I can say it is very stable.

Scalability is not a problem because it is a cloud. The provider manages this aspect for me.

This is the weakest point of Imperva. They have some very good technicians but not at the first level of support. I have already told them this several times. Each time I meet or talk to a chief or director, I say, "Your product is very good, but your support is not at the same level." I provide support to my customers for their solution. So, I know what the customers expect and how to address this kind of expectation. They need some improvement at this level.

The initial setup is very easy and quick. You can put the protection live in less than 10 minutes if you need it.

It is an expensive solution. The price is high as the level of service and security provided is high. A lot of customers tell us that they would love to use Imperva more. I have some customers who have 50 websites, but they protect only 10 websites on Imperva because of the price. They would love to have all their websites running through Imperva, but they can't. They have to choose the more critical websites to protect because the price is very high. It is a very good product, but it is expensive.

If you buy a plan for 20 megabytes and you don't consume all of your 20 megabytes, it is okay, but if you consume more, you are charged for the superior traffic.

I would recommend this solution because I have also used different WAF and DDoS solutions. For me, it is the best solution available. It is quite simple to do the configuration. You can do whatever you want. If you know the product, you can do fine-tuning and have the configuration that you need. You need the knowledge to do this, but you can do this, and it works. Even though it is a high-cost solution, it is easy for me to sell it to customers because I know it will work. I get a little bit stressed about some of the other solutions because I don't trust those solutions like I trust Imperva. 

I would rate Imperva Incapsula an nine out of ten. It is quite a good solution. They can do some improvements, but it is quite a good solution.

Hands down, the WAF is the most valuable feature; being able to identify, block, whitelist or blacklist as needed, are all valuable.

We now have visibility into our traffic in a scope that we never had before, especially being able to review bot vs human traffic and country of origin.

Reporting and the main Sites dashboard could use refinement. We have a lot of sites, and scrolling through the dashboard becomes cumbersome.

I have used it for six months.

The only deployment issue we encountered was getting Incapsula and Akamai to play nice. However, the Incapsula engineers were very helpful in helping us configure our sites in the WAF correctly.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have yet to need customer service.

I rate the level of technical support as very high.

We had not used a WAF before deploying Incapsula.

The setup was straightforward and simple.

We implemented it ourselves with the guidance of the Incapsula team.

It is too soon to tell regarding ROI.

Know your bandwidth requirements.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated so, so, so many other options.

Incapsula:

• Strength of DDoS and WAF
• Simple dashboard
• Analytics
• SSL

CloudFlare:

• Ease of use
• Simple dashboard
• DNS management
• CDN
• SSL

Incapsula:

It has provided heightened visibility and awareness at management level on the actual threat landscape; it paves the way for easier approval for security-related implementations/projects.

CloudFlare:

It provides free SSL certs that can be used on website domains that I did not purchase SSL certs for.

Some protection and CDN caching realized, even though I’m on the free tier.

Incapsula:

• Allow easier scripting of firewall rules.
• Enable more custom actions to trigger turning on/off Incapsula settings (current actions are quite limited).
• Allow setting up of user groups to manage different groups of sites with viewer/operations/admin levels of privileges. This is quite a typical requirement for enterprise clients who will have multiple teams taking care of different sites, plus an overall IT security team who oversees everything.

CloudFlare:

• Improve the strength of WAF/DDoS.
• Reduce the rate of false positives.

I have used Incapsula for about a year.

I have used CloudFlare for almost a year.

Incapsula: The dashboard occasionally is not accessible (probably due to high load) but the sites protected seem intact.

CloudFlare: I have not used it enough to provide useful information.

Incapsula: The only issue so far is with the dashboard.

CloudFlare: I have not used it enough to provide useful information.

Incapsula: Technical support provides fast response via email tickets, and fairly responsive local technical/account reps.

CloudFlare: I have hardly utilized their technical support so far.

I did not previously use a different solution.

For both Incapsula and CloudFlare, initial setup was very easy.

Incapsula:

Pricing is described on their website, but for enterprise agreements, clarify with local reps, as there might be a need for customized needs/pricing. Be clear on how they handle domains and subdomains.

CloudFlare:

Pricing and licensing is very clearly described on their website; 1 site = 1 domain. Clarify how to support subdomains.

We evaluated Incapsula and CloudFlare.

Incapsula:

You need to understand how DNS works (e.g., A records vs CNAME, TXTs etc.), how SSL works and how to set it up, and how web servers work with domains and proxy servers. It is not for the layman, as the dashboard assumes some level of understanding in these topics. Some settings can break your site, so do perform some tests on a development site before turning features on/off in the dashboard. The good thing is that most settings are reversible and take effect quite quickly, so if things do go wrong, it will not stay broken for too long.

Also, use extra caution when dealing with TLDs, as the product does not handle your DNS, so for onboarding of domains using A records, you may need to ask Incapsula support for advice and assistance as it requires assigning the A record to a CNAME or IP address (network folks might understand the problem here).

CloudFlare:

You need to understand how DNS works (e.g., A records vs CNAME, TXTs etc.), how SSL works and how to set it up, and how web servers work with domains and proxy servers. It is not for the layman, as the dashboard assumes some level of understanding in these topics. Some settings can break your site, so do perform some tests on a development site before turning features on/off in the dashboard. The good thing is that most settings are reversible and take effect quite quickly, so if things do go wrong, it will not stay broken for too long.

• Web security
• Protection against DDoS
• Easy to use administration portal
• Reports
• It’s simple to configure
• Very effective
• Easy solution to administer for protecting websites of all sizes

Any website that we publish on the web needs to be fully protected. In hosting environments, installing an on-premise WAF solution or other security device is not feasible. Incapsula provides a very simple to install and configure solution, that can be up and running in minutes. Also, now, we don’t have to worry about the security of the website, or if the bandwidth needs to be increased, as everything is automatic.

It would be nice to have a mobile app as a dashboard interface instead of the web administration, but the service is really great. The product is the best at what it does.

I've used it for three years.

Once the DNS configuration is done, everything works flawlessly.

No issues encountered.

No - in a large scale attack, the protection scaled without problem.

Service is good and prompt, 9/10.

I haven’t had much need for tech support.

We previously used Cloudflare. Although a very good solution, it forces users to completely give up the DNS management of their domain, which most enterprises don’t want to do. Incapsula only needs a redirection of the actual web entry.

Very straightforward. The default settings work very well and are running within minutes. Configuration of advanced features is simple and fast.

Through our own in-house team.

It’s difficult to measure, but without Incapsula, we would be forced to host the website on-premises, with very high costs. ROI is probably within six months.

Setup cost was zero. Annual cost is $7,200.

We evaluated Cloudflare as well.

This is very simple to install. Websites that use SSL should pre-export their certificates and be ready to import them into Incapsula.

All our web services go to the Incapsula cloud application environment for monitoring on the production service.

All the web application protection is under Incapsula because they provide the WAF protection services. Our web services are registered under their cloud environment so all our customers visit our web services. All the web services are under the web application firewall protector.

I think it's from their own cloud solution. I don't think the cloud solution is from Amazon because the IP address does not belong to Amazon. It belonged to Incapsula themselves, so their solution is under their own network cloud environment. Our own data center environment is using the Incapsula cloud service. I think it's a hybrid cloud to include all the private and the public services.

The most valuable features are DDoS protection. The Incapsula environment helps us monitor all the web activity. All the web activity is passed through their WAF cloud services, then that can help us to monitor those activities. That can help protect against DDoS hacking.

We started implementing WAF under Incapsula in 2019 or 2020.

It's very stable because Incapsula services also provides load balancing services for their service IP address environment. So far, with monitoring their services, the IP address was only changed once. Their services are very stable.

We implement the WAF production environment, or the web services, which is needed to provide traffic to the customer. We implement those services under the Incapsula WAF protection. 

We have about one thousand people using the solution globally.

If the scale is 1 to 10, technical support is a 9. Our global service team is more than 10 people. We have a whole Incapsula service team as well as our all global staff team.

We are using our own firewall with the web application services. We used our own firewall before implementing with Incapsula, but we are also implementing it now under Incapsula cloud solutions.

It's very simple because the domain name service is done with the CNAME. We just registered back in our DNS environment. After that, if the domain is resolved by our customer, then they will resolve the domain name which is provided by the Incapsula environment. That means all the network traffic will go through the Incapsula cloud services, and all the network activity can be monitored and protected by Incapsula WAF.

Deployment is simple and very fast. After they define the domain and service, we do some changes, and it takes within one hour. Within 15 minutes, it can transfer all the services from our site. All the network routing paths will pass through the Incapsula WAF cloud environment. It's very fast.

The license is on a yearly basis.

I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.

Because of all these services, you need to look at the company's services budget. If you have the budget and you can implement the web application for tech, or if you just want to move to the cloud, or you're just using your own firewall to do all those protections, Incapsula is a good option. This one just depends on the IT infrastructure budget in your own company or environment.

The solution has the best volumetric DDoS attacks feature.

The solution needs to be improved every time there are new attacks. They need to add new features and techniques to prevent the attacks.

We have been using the solution for seven years.

I rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten.

It is a scalable solution. It is suitable for medium and enterprise businesses.

The solution's technical support services are fine. 

Compared with the competitors, the solution provides better security features, including web protection firewall and DDoS protection.

The solution's initial setup process is complicated. You need to include the right security policy and discover the attack trends. The time taken for implementation depends on the project requirements.

The solution's price is reasonable. Although, it is a bit expensive for small companies. The cost of its licenses depends on the specific project requirement.

I advise others to study their requirements while choosing DDoS protection thoroughly. They should know if the CDN is limited to their region or has a global reach. Also, DDoS attacks appear in different ways every single time. Thus, it is challenging to implement. It is crucial to know its surface, nature, and how to implement the security measures.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten.