14 DAY TRIAL // Barracuda Networks Inc, a well-known company in the field of email and Web security appliances, has recently launched the Barracuda Web Application Firewall 860 and 960 addressed to enterprises and large companies looking for affordable ways to secure Web apps, such as websites or XML Web Services. The new product comes with prices of $24,999 and $34,999 respectively (worldwide pricing and availability may vary), and it was designed to provide comprehensive protection against all sorts of common attacks, like OS command injections, SQL injections, Cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and such.
“Over the past year and a half, Barracuda Networks has been successfully redefining the Web application security marketplace with unprecedented ease-of-use and value in the midmarket through the Barracuda Web Site Firewall product line," Stephen Pao, the vice president of product management for Barracuda Networks, declared. “With today's announcement, we are combining our enterprise and midmarket product offerings into one complete product line and bringing Barracuda Networks’ ease-of-use and straightforward pricing to the high-end market."
While the Barracuda Web Application Firewall 860 can handle up to 150 backend servers and a maximum of 600 Mbps of inbound web traffic, Barracuda Web Application Firewall 960 can support up to 300 servers and 900 Mbps of traffic.
“Ever since its inception, cost and complexity have throttled widespread adoption of Web Application Firewalls even as the need for this security technology has escalated,” added Michael Suby, the research director of Stratecast (a Division of Frost & Sullivan). “Barracuda Networks successfully inserted simplicity and affordability into its line of Web Application Firewall appliances aimed at the mid-market segment last year. With the Barracuda Web Application Firewall 860 and 960, Barracuda Networks is set to prove that this same formula can also benefit the enterprise market.”
Besides releasing the new models, Barracuda Networks Inc has also optimized the Barracuda Web Application Firewall 660 (previously known as Barracuda Web Site Firewall 660), 860 and 960 to provide antivirus protection for all uploads, rate controls, as well as to integrate an XML firewall to ensure site-to-site protection without any additional cost.
Due to the new antivirus capabilities for file uploads offered by the aforementioned products, an organization will be able to make sure that no file upload contains viruses or other types of malware. The need to provide secure file uploads with integrated antivirus protection has increased lately as companies are still creating extranets to enable customers or partners to share data using not only custom web applications, but also off-the-shelf collaboration portals (for example, Microsoft SharePoint).
Moreover, the products come with a fully integrated XML firewall capability that is aimed to maintain the security of any business-to-business application exchange conducted over an XML Web Service and to protect it against denial of service or other threats. Among the embedded functionalities there are the SOAP validation, WS-I conformance checks, XML schema and WSDL enforcement, but also all protections common to standard Web (HTML) software. This innovative capability will allow the Barracuda Web Application to ensure integrated security policy management within the traditional Web (HTML) and the XML Web Services apps.
As to the structure of Barracuda Web Application Firewall, it comes in eight distinct models and it represents a comprehensive and powerful security tool available to websites and Web applications. The product can offer protection against hackers who exploit the protocol or the vulnerabilities to obtain denial of service, data theft or defacement of the website. The Barracuda Web Application Firewall can defend Web applications and services against malware attacks, while also enhancing their performance or scalability since it provides all the functions required for delivering, securing and managing large-scale applications from a single appliance using an easy-to-use interface.