Applications are the foundation of almost all business processes, and organizations are almost totally reliant on applications and APIs. Failure to secure these applications can have far-reaching impact. However, as applications become more complex with added features, new architectures, API communications, and distributed deployment, the number of attack vectors increases. This, coupled with the increasing sophistication and lower barrier to entry of cyber-attacks, makes securing your applications and maintaining a consistent security posture challenging.
The Changing Face of Applications and API Security
Traditionally, IT departments deployed a web application firewall (WAF) and some form of DDoS mitigation in each datacenter hosting their applications. Today, however, the market is shifting to a more centralized, cloud-delivered approach for web app and API protection (WAAP) that is easier to use, simpler to consume, and doesn’t have the operational overhead.
This shift is primarily driven by three things:
- The shift of workloads into the cloud, which frequently necessitates disparate security solutions for each environment.
- Changing application architectures and the increase of APIs communication, which demand additional and different protection
- The lower skill-set requirements to implement and manage app security from cloud services
Citrix Web App and API Protection Service
Citrix Web App and API Protection (CWAAP) service is a cloud-delivered, security solution that provides comprehensive security to all your applications regardless of their architecture (monolithic and microservices-based) or where they are deployed across your multi-cloud environment. It offers protection against application layer attacks with an integrated WAF and volumetric DDoS protection. It’s simple to set up and scales with your application requirements to help you achieve a consistent security posture for your applications by maintaining compliance and governance across multi-cloud environments.
Holistic, proven and layered protection
With thousands of on-prem WAF deployments, Citrix has decades of experience protecting customers’ applications. CWAAP extends and simplifies the offering to protect applications with great flexibility. It includes
- Web application firewall — Protect your applications from the OWASP Top 10 (including SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks) quickly and easily. It uses signatures to block known attacks and also includes a positive security model to secure against zero-day attacks
- Volumetric DDoS protection — CWAAP defends apps against volumetric DDoS attack as well as more intelligent L7 DDoS attacks common today. Citrix boasts one of the world’s largest scrubbing networks with 12 Tbps of capacity spread across the globe, and because the mitigation is always-on, only clean traffic is passed to your application origin servers, and they are always protected.
Protect Any Application, Anywhere
Because application traffic is forwarded to CWAAP for scrubbing and inspection, your web applications are protected regardless of architectural type (monolithic or microservices-based) or where they are deployed (on-premises, private cloud, or public cloud). This makes it easy for you to achieve a consistent security posture as you migrate applications as well as securing your application environment as you transition application architectures from monolith to microservices.
Enable Protection Fast and Scale Quickly and Easily
Citrix Web App and API Protection enables you to secure your apps fast with no infrastructure or operational complexity, so you can roll out applications more quickly and innovate faster. Simple, intuitive dashboards make configuring rules and policies easy, which reduces the skill set required to provide your apps with the security they need. Naturally, security policies are fully customizable, and because your application security is centralized, it is much easier to maintain a consistent security posture across all your environments.
CWAAP acts a proxy for your applications (via DNS or BGP redirection), and you can upgrade capacity in minutes with license upgrades as requirements change. CWAAP is delivered from the cloud, so there is nothing to install or maintain. Citrix handles software updates and threat intelligence so you always have the latest protections.
Simple and Predictable Consumption Model
A simple consumption-based model and transparent billing metrics keep the service charges straight forward and less complex than some public cloud providers. No CapEx requirement mean you can shift to OpEx with annual contract options. Just select the number of applications you need to protect and the combined throughput required (from 25 Mbps to 2+ Gbps) and get immediate protection.
Multi-Cloud Compliance and Governance
Centralized protection helps you ensure that you always follow corporate best practices and meet regulatory compliance with a consistent security posture across applications in your multi-cloud environment.
The intuitive dashboards minimize security configuration errors associated with manual configuration of disparate devices across multiple environments. The centralized nature of CWAAP enables you to create, deploy and update your security policies in one place for all your applications. CWAAP also offers a single pane of glass that provides visibility and ensures demonstrable governance in your environments.
CWAAP replaces the fragmented security tool set that plagues business today and offers fast and simple deployment, easy upgrades, and compliance and governance across all your applications, wherever they are deployed.
CWAAP meets the demands for holistic, layered protection and a consistent security posture in new deployments. It also helps businesses that already have Citrix ADC deployed on premises but that want the benefits of Citrix Web App Firewall technology without having to deploy and manage it on premises.
Learn more about Citrix Web App and API Protection.
