Background
Amazon WAF – A solution to web application security
A team of young and bright entrepreneurs in Asia felt absence of an organized and trustworthy event management business, specifically for weddings.
This team took the challenge of putting a plan together to build a trustworthy business to serve this specific need. The team decided to build and deploy the application and website on the Amazon WAF.
Challenge
Achieving the highest levels of security is an extremely labor-intensive process. Every aspect of the security system must be designed with care and precision, and every component must be tested rigorously.
Even the smallest mistake can have devastating consequences, so security teams must be extremely diligent in their work. The process is further complicated by the need to constantly update and improve the system in order to stay ahead of ever-evolving threats.
As a result, achieving optimal security is a costly and time-consuming endeavor. However, given the stakes involved, it is an essential investment for any organization that wants to protect its people, its property, and its data.
Although this team of entrepreneurs was very ambitious and talented, they lacked the expertise to secure their applications on the web from malicious attacks.
This client needed help with setting up WAF service for their business. They needed to ensure that their site is protected from a variety of application layer attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, cookie poisoning, brute-force attacks, and Server Side Request Forgery (SSRF), and others.
Solution
After a careful review of all available tools to automate the security, the client chose to implement AWS Web-Application Firewall (WAF) to secure their applications and related assets.
Client saw that AWS WAF actually offered security and protection needed from the malicious attacks around the clock. High Plains Computing team was able to set up AWS WAF along with best practices based policies in less than a week.
High Plains Computing implemented Amazon WAF policies built based on best practices that ensure safety of the web application, and security that deal with all threat perceived by the client’s IT team. Some of the key benefits of implementing AWS WAF for client were listed as:
- Protection against SQL injection
- Protection from attacks as it filters, monitors, and blocks an malicious traffic
- Protection from bots that may consume excessive resources
- Provides pre-configured set of rules managed by AWS or AWS Marketplace
- Easily configurable traffic rules that help filter web-traffic
- Improved web traffic visibility and alert generation
- Ability to capture IP addresses, geo-locations from web traffic and make decisions based on it
Result
As a result of exponential growth of systems hosting business critical applications and data, the attacks on these systems have also grown equally if not at a higher rate. With the proliferation of sensitive data, businesses and organizations must be diligent in their efforts to protect against potential threats.
One way to safeguard against security breaches is to carefully review all available tools to automate the security process. By doing so, companies can ensure that they are using the most up-to-date and effective methods to protect their data. Additionally, by automating the security process, businesses can free up resources that can be better used elsewhere.
In today’s data-driven world, a carefully curated security strategy is essential for any business or organization. By taking the time to review all available options, companies can create a plan that will best meet their needs and help to keep their data safe.
Having full understanding of the above, this client’s management decision to adopt Amazon WAF to protect their applications and data provided them much needed worry free time to grow their business instead of chasing the bad actors who are always out to hack systems.
Also do read: Amazon WAF- how to prevent DDoS attacks?
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