How to Get More out of Your WAF with an Integrated Approach

As digital architectures become more distributed and the edge continues to extend closer to end users than ever before, securing applications and the networks on which they rely has become an equally rising challenge. In addition to traditional threats, security teams must now account for the fact that flexible application and service deployment strategies also mean that malicious actors have potential entry points in every corner of the globe.

Meeting these threats head-on requires network and infrastructure security strategies that are equally flexible and customizable. At the same time, with application performance being such a huge differentiator in the consumer market, securing these digital properties must not impede the end-user experience in any way.

Today’s companies are finding that to navigate these choppy waters, they need a provider with a robust and modular approach to CDN security that can address application delivery, application performance and application security in a singular, integrated approach that encompasses not only web application firewall (WAF) and bot risk management (BRM), but DDoS mitigation as well.

Every enterprise has varying security concerns based on factors such as industry, user base, device and application type, performance needs, etc. A global gaming company will have different concerns than a regional ecommerce retailer, who will have different concerns than a local healthcare provider.

For example, a popular gaming platform that allows users from all over the world to interact with each other has thousands – if not millions – of potential entry points that they must monitor and protect with a variety of security measures, including WAF. Additionally, every new game release that generates a huge number of downloads also attracts malicious actors and bots that try to disrupt the flow of data and cause big revenue losses to the gaming provider.

On the other hand, while a retailer must also protect revenue flow during high traffic events such as annual sales events, they are also processing many more transactions that involve sensitive customer data that must be protected from hackers. Additionally, ecommerce sites with many different pages and third-party APIs tend to have more vulnerabilities for attackers and bots to hijack the customer experience through cart blocking, phishing, or unauthorized advertisements.

And while a healthcare provider probably won’t face the threat of DDoS attacks as often as gaming or retail companies, they too face threats at the server and infrastructure level where swaths of sensitive customer data gets stored (e.g. social security numbers, medical records, etc.), making it a target for hackers who seek to profit off of that personal information.

These disparate challenges require vendors of IT services (i.e. network, cloud infrastructure, application security, etc.) to have the flexibility to meet their various customer needs, offering a customizable approach to edge security.

In addition to traditional DDoS mitigation at the network and transport layers across its CDN network and IP backbone, Lumen provides application layer detection and mitigation as well to account for the growing threat of layer 7 DDoS attacks. At the same time, Lumen® CDN Edge Compute offers its customers the opportunity to deploy a wide array of security features at the edge by partnering with best-of-breed security providers for WAF and BRM services. And for enterprises that require a unique security deployment or use an in-house solution, Lumen offers them the opportunity to build directly onto the network infrastructure to deploy their own open-source modules, proprietary software, or custom code.

This modular approach to CDN security allows Lumen customers to not only deploy a holistic security strategy that fits their specific business needs, but it also helps ensure application performance and reliability at a time when even minor end-user experience issues can lead to steep losses in revenue.

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