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.
Loadmaster is very powerful and flexible load balancer. Variety of options allows to create a complex network of rules and routes. During our website rollout Loadmaster allowed us to run multiple generations of the website simultaneously and seamlessly by doing the content switching on the fly. Powerful API allows easy integration into any development lifecycle.
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.
Complexity. You really need. highly skilled IT team to manage this device. This is not a solution or appliance for SME's - medium or large enterprises only!
Bugs, during 2015-2016 we suffered from a. number of bugs that caused downtime that would not have occurred without the Kemp LM. This is especially annoying given that it was purchased to reduce downtime! During 2017 stability improved.
Costs. This is a high cost solution with high ongoing support fees. Not for those who are very cost conscious
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.
Kemp makes it very easy to setup, configure and manage the LoadMaster without needing a lot of help from their engineers. The interface is very easy to understand and intuitive to use. We like how it is not complicated - I can easily have one of my techs login and they can figure out how to setup/configure virtual services for load balancing without needing a manual or tech support.
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).
Support has been easy to deal with; I have only need[ed] to contact them a few times during setup. Once its been in place and operational, we have not need[ed] to mess with the system [which] is a huge advantage. I like system[s] that do not break and require constant attention in a production environment.
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.
The Kemp LoadMaster outshined both of our other evaluated products, mainly in speed of setup, features available, and overall cost of ownership. In the case of the Azure LB it wasn't going to work well for our on Premise servers. The Barracuda was unreliable and difficult to bring online with our needed applications. With the ability to import pre-configured templates into the Kemp load balancer, we were able to have it running within the first day of ownership.
We used Kemp LoadMaster for many projects. For a lot of customers, load balancers were too expensive or too complicated before we introduced Kemp products.
It's not a overly complicated product, so we were able to train many engineers on it and have them get a certification.
