The Profense Web Application Firewall from Armorlogic provides solid protection of web applications by creating a reverse proxy in which all traffic is filtered through the appliance before being sent to the application servers. This firewall is capable of whitelisting, blacklisting and adaptive learning, and can protect many types of web-based services, including XML, SOAP and JSON.
This solution comes in two flavors. It can be deployed either as a physical or virtual appliance on VMware ESX. We found deployment and installation to be quite straightforward and had the virtual appliance up in no time at all. Configuration was also fairly easy. All of it is done via the web-based management interface, which is intuitively organized and easy to navigate.
This product enables a vast amount of configurability and policy flexibility. Rules and policies can be customized for many different application types with just a few clicks of the mouse. This tool also provides a good level of protection against denial-of-service-based attacks and helps minimize data leakage.
Documentation includes a quick-start guide and a full manual in PDF format. The quick-start guide includes installation steps to get the appliance, either physical or virtual, up and running, as well as how to test the appliance to make sure it is properly deployed. We found this to be well written and to include a reasonable amount of screen shots, but more illustrations of various dashboards would have been helpful.
Armorlogic provides the first year of support at no additional cost to customers. Buyers also can access web-based support via a portal, which includes various resources, such as installation documents, though it does not offer a knowledge base or user forum.
At a price of just under $3,000 for the virtual appliance, we find this product to be a good value for the money. The Profense Web Application Firewall provides a solid amount of protection that is reasonably easy to configure.
