Web application firewall

Improve security with a web application firewall.

With a growing number of threats to web security, a web application firewall (WAF) is a critical tool for providing your users with a positive web experience.

Your employees, customers and partners all expect instant, secure and reliable access to rich content and web applications on any device. But as the volume of content and applications continues to grow quickly, rapidly emerging web application security threats jeopardize the experience you want to provide.

A web application firewall offers the best defense against web application attacks that include:

• Malicious file execution, where hackers exploit an application vulnerability to remote file inclusion in order to enter hostile data and code.
• SQL injections, where web applications and databases are overwhelmed or infiltrated by bogus database queries.
• Cross site scripting, where attackers use vulnerabilities in XSS to execute a script in the user’s browser.

The risk in using a web application firewall is that can adversely affect application performance. That’s why, when choosing a web application firewall, more enterprises turn to Akamai.

Kona Web Application Firewall from Akamai.

Kona Web Application Firewall from Akamai provides an always-on and highly scalable application firewall that defends against emerging threats to web security while keeping application performance high. Leveraging the globally distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform™, Kona Web Application Firewall scales easily to defend against massive application attacks, enabling your IT team to forgo investments in expensive dedicated hardware.

As an embedded process within the Akamai Intelligent Platform, Kona Web Application Firewall inspects every HTTP and HTTPS request before serving it, identifying and stopping web security threats before they ever reach the data center. Akamai’s Threat Intelligence Team continuously refines firewall rules to block known attacks and respond to new threats as they emerge. Adaptive rate controls automatically protect against application-layer denial of service attacks, while network-layer controls define and enforce IP whitelists and blacklists to protect your website by restricting requests from specific IP addresses.

Key benefits of Kona Web Application Firewall.

As an enterprise cloud computing solution that is deployed at the edge of your network, Kona Web Application Firewall enables you to:

• Minimize the risk of data breach and downtime with a web application firewall that has the scale to deflect or absorb the largest DoS and DDoS attacks.
• Maintain performance during attacks by relying on Akamai’s a globally distributed architecture.
• Simplify web security with pre-defined application-layer controls that are easily configurable.
• Adapt quickly to a changing threat landscape with security rules that are continuously refined and updated by Akamai's Threat Intelligence Team.
• Reduce the operational expense and capital investment usually associated with web security by leveraging Akamai's cloud security service.

Learn more about Kona Web Application Firewall.