We tried mod_security. Imperva was not a good fit as we can’t use hardware boxes or VM images in a cloud environment. Incapsula and other cloud-provided solutions did not work for us as we can’t share our traffic and SSL keys with any third-party vendors; we have a lot of customers’ data and obligations.

Wallarm’s hybrid approach of deployment with NGINX-based nodes is a good fit for us as it creates almost no tension between the Security and Ops teams.

We have tested and evaluated several WAF solutions, and chose Wallarm. They are the only solution that fits our success criteria and business objectives:

• WAF must have a low (<5%) false negative rate and be ready to protect from all well-known web attacks.
• WAF must have a low (<0.05%) false positive rate.
• WAF must not have any performance issues that impact projects under its protection.
• Deployment takes < 1d for any web project.
• WAF must have an ability to scale well horizontally and not to be a bottleneck to our services.
• Keep monetization level at the same level, after all protection mechanisms enabled.

We didn’t try any other product.

Before we switched to Wallarm's first version, we tested Imperva WAF but Wallarm's results were much better than Imperva and we choose Wallarm with a big discount for first year of usage. It was really good for our needs.

We didn’t look at other solutions, but we had a long trial period.