Akamai CDN vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Akamai is a superior premium services offering if that's what you need from a CDN. For more typical use cases, we're often more often than not implementing MaxCDN, or integrated CDNs from cloud providers (e.g. CloudFront, Azure CDN, etc). If you find that Akamai's offerings are really what you need, and you are okay paying the premium, the services themselves are great. There's a reason they're used by major enterprises of all sizes, and used for hosting video content from the NFL, etc.

Incentivized

If you are looking for a cheap product to meet the bare minimum requirements for PCI or any other compliance regulations, this is not the product. Also, the WAF portion only inspects on HTTP/HTTPS traffic which can be very limiting into other forms of web apps that utilize other protocols. The HTTP/HTTPS inspection that it does do is very in depth and well worth the investment.

Incentivized

• Caching is one of the greatest benefits that Akamai allows for, saving time, money and experiencing the user experience.
• Knowing they provide DDOS and other attack protection gives you peace of mind.
• How finely you can tune all of the different settings available to you, from blocking IPs, cache settings, headers, redirects and even handling error statuses .

Incentivized

• Alert Aggregation - Correlates different violations into perceived correlated attacks.
• Ease of deployment - as one of the only WAFs that allow bridge mode deployment, this can be deployed with without downtime and no Network Architecture modifications. If the need for proxy is required at a later time, Transparent Reverse Proxy can be deployed within seconds and minimal configuration.
• Custom Policies - Custom security policies are easy to configure.
• Reporting - There are a good amount of pre-configured reports available by default.

Incentivized

• Akamai platforms does not come with an intuitive UI to configure and it requires training for set up.
• Akami is mostly costly and will be proven very expensive for small organization that are not scaled.
• Akami activation takes a longer time for a lot of testing with multiple scenarios especially with edge servers scenarios.

Incentivized

• The UI can use a little work (but is largely decent)

There are just a couple of points that are hard to find, that probably could be elsewhere. But these are minor; everything else is right where you'd expect it to be.

Their support documents are excellent and provide a lot of useful information for all their services. The only reason I didn't give them a 10 is that the time it takes for them to respond to an issue could be slightly faster.

Incentivized

We haven't needed support from Imperva since implementation. But during that time, their personnel were very quick to respond to questions. Since then, it's been largely doing its thing for us (which is exactly what we'd hoped).

Akamai offers sophisticated security and defense layers in addition to its content delivery network. Its focus on security is well known and beats offerings from AWS and Azure to punches. It redefined the cloud security market by extending its core offering.

Incentivized

Ultimately, it was the easiest to work with that was still a "known" company (we've been burned too many times by up-and-comers). We needed something that gave us a lot of control but then didn't need its handheld on a daily basis. Imperva gives us a lot of that and we are still able to navigate it with ease.

• Positive - Akamai vastly reduced the number of content delivery servers needed here, saving money, hardware and management overheads.
• Negative - I don't think it's a "cheap" option, but also, you get what you pay for and for such a powerful product you don't expect it to be free.
• Positive - some of the support we have had has been really good.

Incentivized

• Our on-prem firewall has less work to do, allowing it more cycles for other tasks.
• We have better web traffic visibility and control over what actors are doing outside our network.