Think your website is safe just because it’s live? Think again—Skipping WAF is like locking your door but leaving the windows wide open. That’s exactly what you’re doing if your web hosting plans don’t include a Web Application Firewall (WAF). In today’s threat-heavy internet, WAF isn’t an add-on— it’s the bare minimum for keeping your website protected.

A web application firewall (WAF) is a first line of defence that secures websites and web applications through filtering, monitoring and preventing malicious web traffic and application-layer attacks—including DDoS, SQL injection, malware attacks, and cross-site scripting.

A WAF operates at the application level of the OSI model. This means it prioritises web application traffic that flows over the web. WAF tracks and avoids malicious requests before they reach your web server. By doing this, WAF provides an essential layer of protection for both business and their clients, especially when paired with cheap domain hosting that doesn’t compromise on security.

WAFs: An Important Security Element

Since attacks against web applications are a major contributor to security breaches, it is of utmost priority for application security engineers, security architects and information security experts to secure websites and applications.

Web application firewalls secure against vulnerabilities from exploitation by affording a level of security that is unavailable with network firewalls. Traditional network firewalls just aren’t designed to defend web-facing programs that must accept and respond to internet-based requests for content.

WAFs tackle this issue by screening the network traffic, while still permitting applications to directly access the internet. Rather than establishing a virtual wall between internal and external network resources, WAFs work like screens, allowing legitimate traffic but not harmful traffic.

Through this mechanism, WAFs ensure security from some of the most prevalent web application security threats, including poorly designed applications and injection risks. While WAFs do not remove the vulnerabilities or errors that exist in web applications, they can block attacks that try to take advantage of these errors from reaching the application in the first place.

Furthermore, web application firewalls can track web application traffic, attacks and measures taken by a company to protect their web apps — all of which assist auditing and compliance processes.

Functions of a Successful Web Application Firewall

A web application firewall functions using a standard set of regulations intended to safeguard against web-based application vulnerabilities. It smartly tracks and filters network traffic that uses web protocols, most importantly HTTP and HTTPS.

WAF’s functions can be categorised into two types: securing incoming and outgoing traffic. The incoming security feature is designed to scan the traffic from the outside. In the process of safeguarding the website or application against incoming traffic, the WAF detects malicious activity patterns, suspicious workload and vulnerabilities.

On the other hand, outbound protection ensures the security of business and client data. While exact parsing of outbound data is difficult, proxy-based, inline WAFs help by intercepting and avoiding accidental leakage of sensitive data.

Types of Web Application Firewalls

When you use WAFs to safeguard your business, you create rules for enabling, blocking or monitoring web requests under certain conditions. You can, for instance, customise a WAF rule to block requests that have a precise HTTP header or originate from a specific IP address. WAFs are classified by their deployment model.

1.    Network-based WAF:

A network-based WAF, as a hardware appliance that must be licensed and managed, runs on networking equipment (like a switch) positioned between applications and the internet.

2.    Host-based WAF:

Host-based WAFs run on the same servers as the web applications they protect. Because they are installed as a part of the application OS. They apply OS-level filtering on traffic destined to web apps, which is scalable effortlessly.

3.    Cloud-based WAF:

Cloud-hosted applications may utilise a cloud-based WAF, which can be combined with cloud virtual network services or load balancers to inspect web traffic. Although cloud-based WAFs don’t need an extensive team for deployment and maintenance, they often don’t provide full context to threats.

How a WAF is deployed often depends on the hosting environment of the web applications. A cloud-based WAF, for instance, will only function when apps are deployed in the cloud. If maintenance is an issue in deciding on a deployment model, it’s important to consider the setup involved. Network- and host-based WAFs typically involve more configuration and administration, while cloud-based WAFs are easier to manage, often requiring a DNS or proxy update.

What to Contemplate When Selecting a WAF Solution?

Here are a few things to keep in mind when deciding on web application firewall solutions:

●      Which deployment models are offered?

The best WAFs offer multiple deployment features so that they can run on in-house or cloud infrastructure, using fully managed or self-managed methods, based on the options that are appropriate for the business.

●      How does the WAF filter traffic?

The more context a WAF can take into account when it’s considering traffic, the more effective it will be at catching advanced attacks that are likely to bypass traditional firewalls.

●      How efficient should it be?

Any WAF should be strong enough to avoid draining the infrastructure resources that applications rely on.

Apart from these factors, it’s also prudent to consider scalability. How is the WAF expected to scale? Will it have to secure APIs? Since APIs become increasingly integral to app-to-user interactions, being able to secure APIs alongside web applications will be invaluable.

Conclusion

As cloud computing becomes standard in industry, cloud-native applications are growing in both complexity as well as importance. Security needs to be able to evolve at the same rate as the ever-changing threat landscape.

Information security experts — DevOps engineers, security architects, and application security teams will be required to work together and leverage one another’s expertise to create an end-to-end security strategy able to protect the modern enterprise. However, to make this strategy impactful, having a reliable web hosting provider offering pre integrated WAF facility is essential. Partnering with next-generation web hosting providers like MilesWeb strengthens this strategy by offering a stable and secure infrastructure foundation.