Fastly Next-Gen WAF protects Arm-based processor environments as Arm’s edge presence grows
Fastly, a CDN and security services provider, is offering a web application firewall (WAF) service with what it claims is a unique twist: the first WAF to support an Arm-based processor environment at scale. Fastly said the service provides protection for on-premise, cloud, containers, or hybrid deployments. This service hits the market to serve the growing trend of enterprises adopting Arm-based processors for their cloud data centers and edge networks owing to their combination of compute power and energy efficiency.
Fastly’s Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (WAF) service is based on technology gained with the $775M Signal Sciences acquisition. The company said that Next-Gen WAF can operate in multi-processor environments as well — an important consideration given that x86 architectures are still predominantly offered by cloud service providers. Even if the modern enterprise or cloud data centers are equipped with a single Arm instance, the company claims the Next-Gen WAF can perform full protection in inspecting traffic at scale.
“Broader adoption of the Arm Neoverse platform enables our customers to seamlessly deploy unified solutions that drive innovation and better overall TCO,” said Bhumik Patel, director of software ecosystem development at Arm. “The Fastly Next-Gen WAF, combined with processors made with our superior Arm architecture, ensures that organizations can quickly secure their apps and APIs without compromising speed and performance.”
The Fastly WAF delivers protection from advanced web and API cyberattacks, irrespective of the processor used in the network as it is developed with a standard deployment option. Moreover, the Arm agent deployed by Fastly is identical to existing agents, allowing enterprise customers for faster deployment.
During the proof of concept to assess Fastly Next-Gen WAF, the Fastly team closely worked with one of their customers, Linktree, for developing efficient, effective deployment options. The company said that Linktree scaled to support around 4 million new users in 3 months on the Fastly Next-Gen Web Application Firewall.
Against traditional web application firewalls, the Fastly Next-Gen WAF leverages a unique approach that detects and blocks malicious traffic without rules tuning. Moving from the traditional regex-based WAFs, the Next-Gen WAF uses SmartParse, an accurate detection method to evaluate the context of each request and execute the operation to determine the malicious or unknown payloads in the requests.
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