Rapid cloud adoption means that most organisations rely on web-based applications for mission critical services, while all the time malevolent actors evolve their capability. In addition mounting legislation promises significant penalties when data is lost or compromised. Setting up a Web Application Firewall (WAF) on-premise and leaving it to do its work is inadequate. Organisations need to engage and refresh their posture.

The cloud-based R&S Cloud Protector service from Rohde & Schwarz Cybersecurity eliminates hardware and improves access and performance. The cloud-native WAF as-a-service will liberate customers to focus on their business.

Licensing is premised on the amount of data handled, starting at 20 megabytes per second. This can be monitored from the Dashboard, where you can select the most appropriate band. Data peaks will not incur extra costs.

Setup is quick and a DNS forward establishes a credible layer of default protection and APIs can quickly set up large numbers of URLs. The Portal opens with Dashboard, Performance, Security, Account, Settings and Alerts: each has a rich drop-down list to intuitively navigate. Next we selected a security level from Standard, Advanced and High. This essentially balances security, performance and false positives. R&S Cloud Protector can run in one of three modes: Report and do not block, a learning mode, is a good place to start. Report and block applies the system measures and Report and block with bypass allows human intervention.

These modes cannot be customised, but they can be augmented with rules applied and removed as required. This form of tuning could for example block all traffic from specified domains or even countries. Bot detection is covered to prevent brute force attacks by setting the HTTP request rate to a human level. In fact, IP Address Reputations allow granular defence of the risks associated with domains, including scanners, DoS, phishing and Windows attacks.

R&S Cloud Protector holds data within the EU in Paris and Frankfurt. Rohde & Schwarz Cybersecurity have put a lot of thought into taking this WAF beyond the stereotype. Seemingly counterintuitively, it actually accelerates application performance by caching frequently used web pages on the WAF to relieve WEB servers. Non EU visitors also benefit through the Content Delivery Network without compromising data sovereignty or performance.

R&S Cloud Protector offers a wide range of automated reporting options and business units can monitor KPIs and receive automatic alerts. Configuration and management tasks can be distributed across a team.

With such an extensive threat landscape and constant demand for web application performance and availability, the additional services from Rohde & Schwarz Cybersecurity will be popular in web application-centric environments. Some may use this just for initial setup, while others will happily delegate this critical task to specialists.

R&S Cloud Protector relies on a range of external resources including OWASP threat modelling to establish a unique threat profile that works with all other measures. For example, Web Scraping is not a recognised OWASP threat but using configuration it can be blocked.

Web applications require a specialist firewall to protect their services and the organisation from attack and regulation breach. This European cloud-based service provides a compelling option that delivers what is required with a few simple steps. To support growth and dynamic change, as well as more complex and larger web estates, the option of a management service is an advantage. Either way, R&S Cloud Protector will bring cost of ownership down and push defence up. The scalability and pricing of R&S Cloud Protector means that the best is no longer the exclusive preserve of the enterprise.

Product: R&S Cloud Protector
Supplier: Rohde & Schwarz Cybersecurity
Web site: www.cloudprotector.com
Email: cybersecurity@rohde-schwarz.com
Telephone: +44 (0) 1252 818835
Price: Starting at €199 per month per site