It’s that time of the year now, where we select the top two CDN business models for 2015. Last year, we nominated Instart Logic and Aryaka Networks. This year, we have selected Imperva Incapsula for having the most disruptive CDN business model of the year. The other one will be announced shortly. The three things we look for in nominating a CDN: 1) they have to develop a strong differentiated feature-set brand 2) create a new business model and 3) find a new way of securing or delivering content in the cloud. Incapsula is a divergent, and the only cross-over in the CDN industry. They have gone from the traditional perimeter-based, best-of-breed pure-play cyber security product (Imperva) to the CDN Edge Security (Incapsula). That’s amazing, and would be like FireEye or Palo Alto getting into the CDN business.
But Incapsula doesn’t stop there. They have created their own DDoS Mitigation Appliance called Behemoth. They didn’t settle for Arbor Networks or Radware, because they needed something more robust. The Behemoth is a home-grown bad boy that can withstand 170Gbps of DDoS Attacks. In a few quarters, this number is likely to skyrocket as server hardware, NIC throughput, and processing power dramatically increase. In addition, Incapsula developed their own Web Application Firewall (WAF). Seriously, who builds a WAF, because CDNs don’t even do that. But that’s what Incapsula did, and built their WAF from the ground up, rather than using Trustwave’s ModSecurity. The beauty of this approach – the Incapsula security feature set and CDN stack are tightly integrated, operating as a single cohesive system. It’s not composed of best-of-breed components. In doing that, Incapsula takes on Arbor Networks, Neustar, Fortinet, F5 Networks and Akamai in one shot. Conclusion: Imperva Incapsula offers security from behind the corporate perimeter to the data center to the CDN Edge.
