Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service offers purpose-built, comprehensive protection for web apps and APIs with multi-cloud protection and simple licensing.
Complete protection for web and API applications
Stop advanced bots dead in their track
Deploy quickly and easily in 5 steps
Protect any application environment
Gain ease of use and streamline management
Take advantage of simple, deterministic licensing
The Barracuda Advantage
| Features | Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service | AWS WAF |
|---|---|---|
|
Web application security
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[Limited]
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OWASP Top 10 web app risk protection
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[Limited]
|
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Smart signatures
|
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Granular policy enforcement down to the parameter level
|
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Customizable rulesets
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[Limited]
|
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Zero-day attack protection
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[Limited]
|
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API protection
|
[Limited]
|
|
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OWASP Top 10 API risk protection
|
[Limited]
|
|
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JSON security
|
[Limited]
|
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XML security
|
||
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API discovery
|
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Bot protection
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[Limited]
|
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Web scraping protection including known bot database
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[Limited]
|
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Advanced Bot Protection with cloud-based machine learning
|
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Credential stuffing and spraying protection
|
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CAPTCHA support
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Client-side protection
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Virtual patching with Barracuda Vulnerability Manager and other application scanners
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File upload protection
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Auto-configuration engine
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Ensure protection from web application and API attacks.
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service protects applications, APIs, and mobile app backends against a variety of attacks, including the OWASP Top 10, zero-day threats, and application-layer denial of service attacks. By combining signature-based policies and positive security with robust anomaly-detection capabilities, Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service can defeat today’s most sophisticated attacks targeting your web applications. Combine this with API discovery, IP reputation feeds, and smart signatures to ensure web application and API protection.
AWS WAF provides limited protection against the standard application attacks, limited positive security that requires manual configuration, and limited customizability for rulesets. The API protection is limited to JSON APIs and uses the standard web application attack signatures instead of specific API attack signatures.
Stop bad bots dead in their tracks.
Sophisticated malicious bots mimic human users to evade standard bot detection. However, blocking legitimate bots can harm your business. So modern bot defense has to both distinguish between legitimate and malicious bots, and between human users and advanced bots. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service offers Advanced Bot Protection that uses machine learning to continually improve its ability to spot and block bad bots and human-mimicking bots — while allowing legitimate human and bot traffic to proceed with minimal impact.
AWS Bot Manager offers signature-based security and some basic behavior-based security, but it is not able to identify individual clients behind an IP address or perform complex challenges to determine human versus bot. It does not offer any credential stuffing protection or any machine learning to detect advanced bots.
Protect every application environment.
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service offers two deployment modes — SaaS and containerized deployments. Whatever your application environment, whether it is built as a traditional tiered application, containers, or serverless, it can be protected by Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service. When deploying containerized appliances, you can choose to deploy Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service containers to protect both east-west and north-south traffic at no additional cost.
The AWS WAF is available only as a module on the AWS Application Load Balancer and does not offer close-in protection for deployments like containers.
Gain ease of use and streamline management.
Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service leverages our advanced vulnerability scanner to constantly monitor your entire deployment for vulnerabilities. Any identified vulnerabilities can then easily be remediated automatically or with a single click. Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service provides complete customizability for rules and signatures — you can modify, enable, or disable for any part of the application as you need. In addition, there are ease-of-use features built in, like the machine-learning-based auto-configuration engine and one-click fix for false positives from logs to make administration easier.
The AWS WAF does not have any virtual patching capabilities or ease-of-use and configuration features for admins. Whether you use the web UI or CloudFormation, creating rules requires significant effort from admins. The limitations on the number of rules that you can deploy adds a layer of complexity to design and creation of the rules for your applications.
Take advantage of simple, deterministic licensing.
Whichever deployment model you choose, Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service offers simple, all-inclusive licensing. You can choose to either purchase through the AWS Marketplace and pay as you go, or purchase term licenses (BYOL) depending on your preference. Either way, the pricing is simple and deterministic.
The AWS WAF on the other hand has both fixed and variable costs that make determining the final pricing quite difficult. The pricing varies based on whether you create your own rules, use managed rules, use other features like bot control, and the number of requests your application receives. This makes it quite difficult to budget for usage, and bill shock is quite likely.
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