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.

We provide our clients with Cloud WAF Service, which enables us to detect and report web shell attacks against their servers. 

The main benefit is that all traffic is shifted by the cloud service, which exists outside the customer's infrastructure. It's highly efficient. Many customers have problems inside the infrastructure that must be efficiently detected. With Cloud WAF we can notify our client when an attack is outside and detect when a web shell script is already running on the server. This information helps the client understand what's happening with the web shell.

We've reduced many false positives using Cloud WAF Service. The learning period is helpful. Radware sends a policy with a lot of information that helps the customer observe and design their policies to eliminate false positives.

Cloud WAF saves us a lot of time because we face many strong attacks. It helps us modify the back end and implement some policies to prevent more attacks.

The best feature is the SQL injection signatures, and another is the DDoS protection. Radware is more efficient than other solutions. It handles unknown threats very well. We face many bad requests with malware that are expensive to remedy. Radware's service center in the cloud helps a lot. 

Radware's bot manager can be improved because it's very complicated to implement for apps. Radware could also add alerts by WhatsApp or Telegram. It only sends notifications via email or SMS.

We have had issues with Cloud WAF one or two times, but the service works fine most of the time.

Cloud WAF scales very well. 

I rate Radware support nine out of 10. They have a simple platform for opening tickets, and they respond quickly. 

Our previous solution was hard to install, but Cloud WAF is straightforward because it's cloud-based. You add the certificate for the business and point it to the IP. Deployment is very fast. It takes 30 minutes to an hour.  Cloud WAF requires some maintenance when a customer changes their website or programs. We need to adjust the policies.

I rate Radware Cloud WAF Service eight out of 10. It is the best solution for stopping DDoS attacks. 

After a security breach on one of our web applications, we transitioned to a cloud-based web application firewall solution. We chose Radware Cloud WAF Service to protect our critical web applications.

I would rate Radware Cloud WAF Service's ability to block unknown threats and attacks as nine out of ten.

Radware Cloud WAF Service initially operated in a learning mode for the first week after deployment, gathering data. Once it switched to action mode, we began to experience the service's full benefits.

Cloud WAF has helped reduce our false positives by 20 percent.

We have implemented Cloud WAF in conjunction with Alteon, and we are currently integrating a bot manager and web application DDoS protection. The integration was easy because we were accompanied by Radware.

Cloud WAF has helped free up our IT team for other projects.

The most valuable feature of Radware Cloud WAF Service is the visibility into attacks that are being cut off instantly.

It would be ideal if Radware could offer a bundled package that includes Cloud WAF, web DDoS protection, bot manager, and Alteon for a more comprehensive security solution.

I have been using Radware Cloud WAF Service for two and a half years.

Radware Cloud WAF Service is scalable.

Radware Cloud WAF Service met our scaling requirements.

The technical support is great. I have nothing bad to say about them.

Positive

The initial deployment process went smoothly and was completed in three weeks by a five-person team consisting of two representatives from our organization and three from Radware.

The pricing is fair. We pay for what we need.

After evaluating Radware Cloud WAF Service against other options and confirming its leading position in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls, we chose it for our web security needs.

I would rate Radware Cloud WAF Service nine out of ten.

No maintenance is required on our end.

Radware Cloud WAF Service does what is expected and reduces the number of attacks on our web applications.

We utilize it as a front end for all external connections to our public-facing websites, allowing us to manage traffic and redirect it accordingly. This enables us to store data in the cloud and other remote locations, while also protecting our internal servers from potential security threats by preventing malicious traffic from reaching them.

The solution is deployed on Azure and AWS cloud.

Cloud WAF appears to effectively block unknown threats and attacks. We had been using the on-prem version for a long time with Radware in our applications, which is why we switched to the cloud version. Overall, it seems to perform its job very well.

The automated analytics are great.

The main benefit that I believe we receive is that if our data is in the cloud and connects back to us, we don't have to worry about any traffic hitting our edge. This seems to be the most advantageous aspect. Additionally, Radware Cloud WAF Service is very effective in stopping any exploits or patterns used in SQL injections for our homebuilt applications that are public-facing. Therefore, based on our experience and needs, it appears that Radware Cloud WAF Service is doing a good job and we haven't encountered any problems.

The solution has been effective in decreasing the number of false positives. Additionally, with the on-prem solution, I was uncertain about how to use it initially. Generally, Cloud WAF is superior because it provides monitoring and assistance with modifications. This is particularly helpful in situations where new code is added to the website and it results in incorrect blocking. However, in the event of a false block, it's straightforward for us to submit a ticket, and the response time for remediation is prompt.

When it comes to deploying and integrating Radware Cloud WAF Service into our app for new purposes, it functions exceptionally well. Its learning mode is particularly impressive, as leaving it in this mode for a while allows it to identify trends and perform auto-tuning, saving us time. While we have not yet integrated any APIs, it works seamlessly when incorporated directly into our applications. Radware Cloud WAF Service learning analytics and autonomous adaptation to the environment are both top-notch.

Radware Cloud WAF Service helped our IT team to free up time, allowing us to concentrate on other projects. As we gradually shift our on-premises systems to the cloud, it has become much less labor-intensive. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a false positive, I simply submit it to them, and they take care of it for us. It's reassuring to have a team managing those policies.

We quickly realized that there were significant deficiencies in some of our applications when using on-premises technology. As we started to migrate data to the cloud and other locations, we recognized that cloud technology was the only option. We understood that it was a crucial tool to have from the very beginning, and we saw its value immediately. Although we are still in the process of migrating data to Cloud WAF from on-premises, it is evident that managing data through Cloud WAF is much simpler. In fact, managing the five applications we have running through it is considerably easier than with on-premises technology. Additionally, the reporting capabilities are better through Cloud WAF, and this is essential for sharing information with our leadership. Overall, we noticed the benefits of Cloud WAF immediately.

DDoS protection is a valuable feature that works efficiently. Currently, we have both DDoS protection and a regular package. Although we are in the process of piloting the bot, we haven't yet implemented it or purchased it. However, it seems that the bot is successfully blocking a significant amount of traffic. This feature could be helpful in the future, but we have only been testing it for a month or so.

The reporting has room for improvement.

We've had some issues with putting certificates in.

We considered using Radware Cloud WAF Service to protect our API gateway with a WAF. However, we encountered issues with licensing since we had to obtain a license for each individual connection, which was not suitable for our API. To deploy one API Gateway, we would need to purchase 30 licenses, which was expensive. Additionally, we experienced difficulties with obtaining support and resolving the issue, which went on for several weeks. Eventually, we decided to explore other options due to the lack of time to address the problem.

The scaling is not cost-effective and has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The solution is stable. We haven't had any major issues in the past four years. There was one incident where our sites were down for around thirty minutes while the team was working on it. Although it was a challenging situation at that time, I cannot recall any other significant problems that caused any major impact or caused our sites to go down for such a duration.

Our deployment is relatively small, but I believe the solution has great scalability potential. All we need to do is purchase extra licenses. However, the API gateways have been causing issues for us.

The level of support provided by the team is inconsistent but generally good. However, we have noticed that the ERT team may take a day or two to respond to low-priority tickets, but they are prompt in responding to high-priority tickets and resolving the issue quickly. One area where we faced challenges was with the new API gateway deployment, as we did not receive the required level of support. Additionally, there were restrictions on using Logstash in Amazon SQS, which limited our logging capabilities, and this could be improved. Although we did face issues with the CERT page and had to reach out to support to obtain intermediate CERTs, it took a long time to resolve the issue, but it has since been resolved.

Neutral

We previously used Radware WAF Service on-prem before switching to the cloud.

The initial setup is simple, but there are some issues with the logging sources and how we import the logs into SIM. This aspect could be improved, but overall everything else went smoothly. We were able to easily configure the search function, assign an IP address to the back end, create the tunnel, and get the system up and running within a matter of days.

The deployment required two people.

The implementation was completed in-house with the vendor support team.

It's difficult to quantify the value of security, but implementing a solution can give us a sense of comfort. Based on my experience, I believe we see a positive return on investment, especially considering the amount of time and manual effort required for on-premises security compared to using a Cloud WAF. Therefore, I'm confident that our investment is paying off.

We are paying $20,000 annually for six licenses that provide basic WAF functionality. However, the cost of API gateways is exorbitant.

To utilize extra WAF bandwidth, an additional fee is applicable, and the same goes for the bot.

We are also evaluating AWS WAF and Pulse vWAF.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

I am not sure if there is a TCO. We could disable the solution immediately, and the affected websites would function normally. However, in the event of a security breach, exploitation of a site, or unauthorized data access, what would be the potential cost? While it may be difficult to quantify security costs, I do not believe that using Radware Cloud WAF Service has reduced overall expenses because we could operate without it. Nonetheless, in terms of the time invested in on-premises versus cloud WAFs, I would say that it is roughly equal to other WAFs. Ultimately, security is something that we cannot put a price on, and it is a necessary investment regardless of the expenses incurred.

This solution is publicly available, and we have numerous customers throughout the United States and Canada. While it's difficult to provide an exact figure, we typically have around a thousand active connections to the website per minute, adding up to several thousand users across the US.

Refreshing certificates are probably the most important part of maintenance. If new code is deployed and it doesn't integrate well, we need to ensure that our refinements are done correctly or seek support. We often identify these issues while working with our internal team to correct them, and Cloud WAF has helped to identify many of them. When we encounter issues, we contact the team who will confirm the issues. We then retrieve a portion of the code and realize that something was not deployed correctly on the website.

Radware Cloud WAF Service can be integrated with various systems, such as firewalls, endpoints, and clouds. This solution is highly flexible and efficient. Its implementation is straightforward and not complex. No additional service fees are required when working with Radware. As long as there is a skilled networking professional in charge, the integration process should run smoothly.

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 Radware Cloud WAF Service primarily for monitoring purposes within our organization.

I like the security features when looking at the dashboard where I can see a lot of attacks that are rejected and blocked. It's one of the best features, and I approve of this solution. Radware Cloud WAF Service ensures our systems are stable, running smoothly, and blocking all attacks effectively.

There should be more customization options for the dashboard, as it is currently fixed and cannot be modified. Additionally, the API is limited to data retrieval and does not support programmatic modifications. It would be beneficial if we could perform POST requests and integrate our applications more effectively.

I have been using Radware Cloud WAF Service for five months.

I rate the stability of Radware Cloud WAF Service as nine out of ten. There have been no issues with downtime, bugs, or glitches.

The scalability of Radware Cloud WAF Service is very good, and I would rate it nine out of ten in terms of handling the capacity and volume.

I would rate the technical support from Radware as a nine out of ten.

Positive

We previously used Imperva but switched to Radware Cloud WAF Service primarily due to pricing. Both products are top-ranking solutions, but Radware is cheaper.

The initial setup of Radware Cloud WAF Service was easy.

We received support from Radware, which made the implementation process easy.

The ROI for Radware Cloud WAF Service is prominent as it is twenty percent more cost-effective compared to Imperva.

When comparing the pricing of Radware Cloud WAF Service, I would rate it as seven out of ten, with one being cheap and ten being expensive.

Yes, we switched from Imperva to Radware Cloud WAF Service.

Overall, I would rate Radware Cloud WAF Service as eight out of ten. The areas for improvement include customization and API functionality. I would recommend Radware Cloud WAF Service because it is a good solution, and we are satisfied with the benefits it offers.

We had adware attack mitigation systems and DDoS appliances in place, but these are primarily designed to handle flood attacks. We found that our frontend pages, including our online banking, were being attacked by bots. Hundreds of these connections created such a high load on our backend web servers that they failed to respond to legitimate requests. 

Our primary use case for Cloud WAF is to stop these malicious bots from continuously calling up web pages. They look legitimate, but they constantly call or refresh the web page.

We haven't integrated much yet. Cloud WAF is protecting our frontend pages, but our banking profile for logging our backend financial transactions sits behind our corporate frontend pages. Cloud WAF is also protecting that piece. Once we've completed protecting our landing pages, we'll start working on our other applications. 

From a financial point of view, we no longer constantly need to appropriate more horsepower to our backend web servers to service these requests because Cloud WAF is preventing malicious bots from accessing our web page. It reduced the load on our backend. 

We don't have all the in-house expertise to investigate a typical HTTPS request to see what's happening. We rely on Radware's emergency response team to provide us with biweekly feedback saying, "This is what we've observed and what we recommend." 

By using Radware Cloud WAF, we don't need to hire web threat specialists. We can rely on Radware's emergency response team to fine-tune our policies. Spinning up a web application firewall on our own is a long and challenging process. It's far easier to outsource that job to Radware.

Using Radware freed up resources, especially on the web side. We would typically require an internal team to look after the web pages, but that has been outsourced to Radware. Now, those employees can shift their focus to other projects, and they need not worry about what Radware's doing because they know that it's in the capable hands of an experienced team. 

Cloud WAF reduced our false positives. That's one feature Radware is known for. We get very few false positives, but when we do, we bring them up during our biweekly meeting with the Radware team. They help refine our policies so we no longer see the same issue. Most Radware products perform exceptionally well at eliminating false positives.

It's hard for us to quantify the reduction of false positives because it's a relatively new product. We'll start collecting these metrics toward the end of 2023. Based on our customer call center's feedback, we haven't received complaints about blocking legitimate traffic. When we adopted Cloud WAF, that was a concern our business units had. Some were worried we would deny a lot of traffic. That hasn't been a problem thus far. 

We now have more accurate statistics about legitimate website visitors because we've eliminated those malicious bots that artificially inflated the number of hits on our website. It was creating a false impression that we had an unusually high number of hits. Traditionally, they were there for web scraping, but we eliminated unwanted traffic pushing up our analytics. Google Analytics gave us the impression that we had a ton of traffic. Those figures have gone down because we've eliminated the baddies.

The most valuable components are the bot manager Radware offers as part of graph services and the WAF component. We haven't begun using the API protection, but we plan to implement that in the latter half of 2023. We're also looking at the content delivery network feature. CDN serves static web pages from the Cloud WAF to speed up processes. 

We recognize the potential value of the CDN function. It's part of Cloud WAF, so it can also be enabled relatively quickly. The CDN function offers specific bolt-on security because the application services are protected, and the CDN function is a click away. It doesn't require changes to our backend applications. We only need to use a TNA, and we will have access to the CDN features.

We're currently getting our money's worth from the WAF, the bot manager, and the DDoS components. We see a lot of value in these three components of Cloud WAF.

Our current web protection relies on a negative security model. In other words, we use signatures for known threats. We will eventually transition to a proactive security model Cloud WAF can accommodate where we deny everything by default and only allow specific things. 

We're currently vulnerable to zero-day attacks because we depend on known signatures. We're looking forward to shifting to a positive security model from the WAF we use in conjunction with the bot manager. Radware's intelligence about known bots is an extreme value add to us. 

The automated analysis of events is intuitive and user-friendly because we're not flooded with thousands and thousands of events. The analytics features provide a summary, so there's no need to look for something line by line. It's aggregated into a nice simplified event with the option to drill down for more details. 

We can investigate if we experience issues from a specific subset of customers. For example, we can search by ISP, URL, or IP address. Cloud WAF adds a lot of value by enabling us to pinpoint where we are experiencing an issue.

Our only complaint is the reporting on the DDoS side. We also use Radware for on-premises DDoS protection and their Vision product. I just want to paint you an example. We face so many Layer 3 and Layer 4 DDoS attacks on Cloud WAF. The reporting on those types of attacks can be improved.

We started a pilot project in April 2022 and purchased Cloud WAF in November 2022.

Cloud WAF has been extremely stable. We only had one service interruption during our proof of concept, but it has been reliable since we went live. We've never needed to make a DNS entry change and redirect that web traffic back to our perimeter. 

In the beginning, we were constantly watching it, but we don't have to check on it now that we know it's working. 

We haven't experienced any scalability issues because we requested all the throughput needed for our necessary applications or services from a bandwidth and billions of transactions per month. 

I rate Radware support a ten out of ten. I'm pleased so far. Everything was new to us in the initial phases. We called or emailed them, and they helped us within five minutes. Now, we follow the standard process where we log a case ticket and get a response in ten minutes. 

Positive

We used on-premises security solutions, but we are moving to cloud-based applications. Radware has done such an excellent job with our perimeter and cloud DDoS services. They were the only ones who correctly identified our issue with these small low-bandwidth usage attacks coming that look legitimate to the existing web solution. We piloted the web and bot manager solutions, and we were astonished by the number of malicious bots accessing our website and how that impacts our KPIs.

The WAF service runs on Radware's cloud. Their infrastructure is in a neutral co-location. Radware is able to offer the same protection for our on-prem equipment because it uses Nginx. Cloud WAF can protect on-prem systems plus AWS and Azure clouds.

The onboarding was quick. We finished within half an hour and moved some services onto the Cloud WAF within an hour. The beauty of the solution is that it requires no major changes on the customer side. You make a DNS entry change to point your website to the Radware hardware.

There is no maintenance on our side. We have a strict SLA with Radware that requires notification far in advance about maintenance on their end. They typically avoid maintenance at the end of the month, which is a busy period because people need to do banking. They also do not do maintenance during a year-end freeze. They only do maintenance on one location at a time, so if they take one down, we can continue working on the other. They have built that availability in South Africa.

We haven't seen a return on investment, but we expect to see that in the third year. If we set this up ourselves, we would need to pay for all the necessary appliances, hardware, VMs, and internal staff. Outsourcing to the Cloud WAF solution saved us capital expenses but increased our operational expenditures. We'll have some stats on the total cost of ownership by the end of the year. The time to spin up our own WAF service would be a lot longer than paying for Cloud WAF to protect our applications. 

A yearly license worked out to be a lot cheaper than what other competitors offered for an on-prem solution. We negotiated with Radware and managed to strike a good deal. The company was accommodating to our particular needs as a financial institution. We had to test things for pre-production and spin-up because they charge per FQDN as a service or an application.

When it came to pre-production testing, they set it up for us with a minimal charge, so our QA and UA teams could do testing. We saw the value added from DDoS protection for Layer 3 and Layer 4 attacks. It includes API protection. We had to pay extra for bot managers, but the pricing is competitive overall.

If you plan to deploy Cloud WAF, keep in mind that the product is priced based on the megabits of traffic that pass through and the number of transactions. You should get your requirements correct up front. The active attackers feed and CDN services cost extra, so you need to negotiate these features up front. 

Another company had a similar service but didn't have a presence in South Africa. Radware has got two locations in the country, and that was a deciding factor. There were other financial institutions and retailers on the cloud, so it was easy to decide that we no longer wanted to do this on-premises. We decided that it was better to let Radware spin up and maintain the hardware.

I rate Radware Cloud WAF a ten out of ten. 

No experts are required from our side, the onboarding is straightforward, maintenance is easy, and Radware's security operations enable us to stay agile. 

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.