RSA 2012: WAF Added To QualysGuard Cloud Security Platform

Qualys, the information security and cloud solutions provider, today unveiled its Web Application Firewall (WAF) as part of a series of new services added to the QualysGuard cloud platform.

Introduced at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Qualys claims its WAF will protect business-critical sites from unwanted requests, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, spammers and SQL injections. The company also claims that the service will provide “increase web site performance through caching, compression and content optimization”.

Existing threat and zero-day protection

“With the proliferation of cloud computing, web applications have become the soft belly of the Internet and the main target for attackers,” Philippe Courtot, Qualys’ chairman and CEO, said in a statement. “Until now, the cost and complexity of deploying WAFs and managing rules have made them inaccessible to most companies. Our forthcoming next generation WAF service will bring the power and cost-effectiveness of the cloud to enterprises of all sizes.”

Qualys touts the WAF as a green, easy to use and easy to maintain tool which will protect against existing and real-time attacks. A limited beta testing period will begin in the second quarter of 2012.

Other announcements expected from the company at RSA include a zero-day risk analyser module built on VeriSign’s iDefense service, which will determine the impact of a sudden threat on IT infrastructures and critical systems, and an enterprise version of Qualys’ Malware Detection service, giving consumers the ability to track malware across sites with notifications and advanced reporting.

“Our cloud platform allows us to bring new functionalities to our customers at a much faster pace than traditional enterprise software, and makes them accessible in a unified manner,” Courtot said. “As importantly, the cloud model permits us to correlate information more effectively and in near real-time.”

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