What is WAF as a Service?

WAF as a Service (WAFaaS) offers web application firewall (WAF) capabilities as a cloud-native service. WAF solutions act as a critical protection for corporate web applications and APIs, protecting them against exploitation and potential misuse.

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What Does WAF as a Service Do?

WAFaaS acts as an intermediary between web applications and their advanced users. It inspects inbound HTTP requests to the web application and can identify and block various types of malicious traffic before they reach a potentially vulnerable web application.

WAFaaS differs from other WAFs because it is offered as a service rather than a standalone solution.

This enables an organization to subscribe to the level of protection it needs and adapt quickly as business and security needs change.

The Need for WAF as a Service

Cloud environments evolve rapidly as DevOps teams push out new releases and updates at regular intervals. Each of these updates has the potential to introduce:

  • New applications to protect
  • New vulnerabilities in existing applications

While corporate cloud infrastructure expands, so do cybercriminals’ capabilities.

Newly discovered vulnerabilities and attack techniques pose a significant threat to corporate web applications and can be difficult to remediate quickly at scale.

WAFaaS is essential to protecting an organization’s cloud web applications against potential exploitation. With the ability to identify and block attempted exploits in web traffic, they reduce the potential impacts of web application vulnerabilities on the organization and its customers.

Types of Attacks Web Application Firewall Protect Against

WAF as a Service solutions can protect against a wide variety of cyberattacks against web applications, including:

  • SQL Injection (SQLi).
  • Cross-Site Scripting (XSS).
  • Malicious bots.
  • Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
  • Brute force password guessing attacks.

Main Capabilities of WAF as a Service

WAFaaS can be a critical component of an organization’s cloud application security (AppSec) strategy. Some key capabilities of WAFaaS offerings include the following:

  • Real-Time Protection: WAFaaS monitors traffic to web applications and blocks attempted attacks in real time.
  • Application-Layer Attack Security: Many threats to web applications occur at the application layer or Layer 7 of the OSI model. WAFaaS offerings must have deep visibility and understanding of application traffic and the ability to correctly identify attempted attacks.
  • API Protection: In addition to protecting web applications, WAFaaS should also offer security geared toward cloud APIs as part of a holistic web application and API protection (WAAP) service.
  • Threat Intelligence Integration: Directly ingesting threat intelligence feeds enables WAFaaS solutions to more quickly identify and block emerging and persistent threats to web apps.
  • Intelligent Threat Detection: Artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) are powerful tools for identifying novel and sophisticated attacks. WAFaaS solutions that integrate these capabilities offer superior threat prevention capabilities than those that do not.
  • Management and Reporting: Security teams need visibility and reporting capabilities to track the effectiveness of security solutions and generate internal and external reports. WAFaaS solutions should offer configurable reporting capabilities to streamline the process of collecting, formatting, and reporting essential data.

Benefits of WAF as a Service for Businesses

WAF as a Service offers various benefits for an organization. Some of the most common and significant include the following:

  • Enhanced Security Posture: WAFaaS offers highly scalable security managed and updated by the service provider. Subscribing to a WAF as a Service offering enhances an organization’s security posture by improving its ability to detect and block potential threats to its web applications.
  • Reduced Risk of Breaches: Many cyberattacks against web applications are designed to exploit them to steal sensitive data. WAFaaS reduces an organization’s risk of data breaches by identifying and blocking attempted SQL injection and other threats from reaching vulnerable web applications.
  • Regulatory Compliance: Regulations are requiring increasingly stringent protections for sensitive data and may explicitly mandate the use of a WAF to protect web applications. WAFaaS helps organizations to achieve and maintain regulatory compliance by protecting them against potential data breaches and meeting the security requirements of applicable regulations.

WAF as a Service with CloudGuard WAF

As corporate cloud deployments expand and rapid development introduces new security risks, WAFaaS is a critical part of an organization’s application security and threat prevention strategy. Check Point CloudGuard WAF offers WAFaaS capabilities — as well as other essential features — to protect corporate cloud assets against attack.

Learn more about building security in the cloud with CloudGuard AppSec by checking out this whitepaper. Then, see CloudGuard’s WAFaaS and other security capabilities in action by signing up for a free demo.

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