SAN FRANCISCO – RSA CONFERENCE – Qualys, a provider of cloud-based security and compliance solutions, today said that its QualysGuard Web Application Firewall (WAF) service for web applications running in Amazon EC2 and on-premise is now available.
Announced in beta last July, the new offering is deployed as a virtual image alongside web applications and can be set up and configured within minutes, Qualys said.
“Companies today are challenged with protecting their websites against attacks and complying with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) standard for transactions on their sites. But many organizations, especially smaller businesses, do not have the expertise or resources to effectively deploy WAFs,” said Charles Kolodgy, Research VP at IDC. “By introducing a lower cost, easy-to-use and deploy WAF cloud solution, Qualys can aid organizations in improving protection of their websites and web applications.”
According to the company, the QualysGuard WAF offers:
• Easy set-up – QualysGuard WAF is deployed as a virtual image alongside web applications. It can be set up and configured in minutes, requiring no equipment or admin resources or dedicated security staff to get set up and running.
• Real-time application defense and hardening – QualysGuard WAF blocks attacks against websites in real time. The service provides a shield around coding defects, application framework flaws, web server bugs, and improper configurations.
• Automatic updates – Running on the QualysGuard Cloud Platform, the WAF service is updated automatically with new defenses from the Qualys research team, and the defense is activated intelligently according to specified policies — all without disrupting the websites or site visitors.
• Centralized Cloud Management – Delivered via the QualysGuard Cloud Platform, WAF can be centrally managed from anywhere in the world via the QualysGuard console. It provides a clear dashboard showing timelines and geolocation graphs of events. The cloud platform also provides maximum efficiency by security events from all customers, with immediate rules deployment to all WAFs connected to it.
QualysGuard WAF is available for download as a VMware virtual image. Amazon Web Services (AWS) users can launch WAF appliances from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) to protect their websites and applications running on Amazon EC2. QualysGuard WAF is sold as annual subscriptions starting $1,995 for small businesses and $7,995 for larger enterprises based on the number of web applications and virtual appliances.
