Barracuda just launched its Web Application Firewall (WAF) platform as a cloud-delivered model with improved configuration and a new management interface aimed at simplifying application security for companies of all sizes.
The new WAF-as-a-Service offering will protect websites and web applications against numerous kinds of threat, including complex layer 7 attacks, bots, JSON threats, SQL injection, DDoS and OWASP Top 10.
The WAF is self-managed and provides its users with a wide range of different control strategies, from the ability to build and tune every policy separately to the simplicity of 1-touch deployment via Barracuda Vulnerability Remediation Service (BVRS). BVRS allows administrators to easily find, automatically remedy and continuously monitor web application vulnerabilities.
Compliance regulations can also be easily enforced across the expanding network perimeter with the new cloud-based WAF.
Following implementation, the cloud-based WAF-as-a-Service begins to protect applications within minutes, wherever they are hosted, and at whatever scale of operations is required from enterprise-scale production deployments to DevOps workflows.
“Organizations of all sizes continue to adopt cloud applications to improve customer engagement; however, security needs to remain a top priority. Regardless of where applications are deployed, companies still need advanced protection against all types of global attacks, while still having the ability to enforce applicable compliance regulations throughout the expanding network perimeter,” explained Hatem Naguib, GM & SVP of Security at Barracuda. “With this announcement, Barracuda removes the complexity from deploying and managing application security, without removing the control. The new Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service can help organizations bring powerful protection to their web applications.”
The reduction of complexity in deployment and management of existing application security models is aimed at reducing administrative overhead costs for enterprises, while not sacrificing the level of control that DevOps teams traditionally require.
The WAF-as-a-Service builds on Barracuda’s existing WAF offerings, including physical and virtual appliances. The new cloud-delivered WAF additionally offers new mechanisms for managing, deploying and integrating application security into an application delivery stack. Nitzan Miron, VP of Product Management for Application Security Services at Barracuda, told eWeek that the new WAF dramatically simplifies configuration. “With the existing WAFs that we had, you would still have to go in—and whether it’s physical or virtual—you would still have to set up the machine, give it an IP address, connect it to the network, manage the policies and deal with failover. With WAF-as-a-Service, we take all the complexity and do it for customers.”