ASP switched from Imperva Incapsula to use AWS native services, saving them a five-figure sum per month and simplifying their operations, while maintaining strong security and fast websites for customers.
The costs of the Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Content Delivery Network (CDN) decreased by 90%.
Meet the Customer
ASP provide innovative and goal-driven website design, an event-focused CMS, called ‘Showoff’ and host 350+ customer websites. Security and website speed are thus extremely important to ASP. For 3+ years, Incapsula was a key part of achieving that goal.
Their Challenge
Overall, ASP were very happy with the services Incapsula offered. Since the move to AWS ASP’s focus was on cost saving and automation, so that raised a few issues:
- Incapsula was a big cost for ASP, paying a five-figure sum per month.
- ASP peak bandwidth was 200mbps across 350+ sites and pricing was based on this maximum, rather than on-demand pricing.
- Operations, particularly onboarding new customers and their websites, were time-consuming for example dealing with SSL Certificates and DNS Records on behalf of customers.
The Results
Moving to AWS native services was a way to address all of those issues, while ensuring high standards for security and website speed.
With the help of Cloudsoft, ASP migrated from their old hosting provider to AWS. This brought countless benefits such as enabling faster innovation and experimentation, modernising the application architecture, and reducing costs at the same time. Moving from Incapsula to AWS native services was a natural next step. The combined cost of the old hosting provider and Incapsula were reduced by 52% by moving to AWS.
Dan Pacitti, CTO of ASP, summarised this:
We’re delighted with the move from Incapsula to AWS. Not only is it saving us a lot of money every month, it’s also made day-to-day operations simpler by consolidating our resources in AWS and allowing us to automate more of our processes. The customer service we get from Cloudsoft and AWS is also a huge factor: they both proactively help us to save money and modernise our application.
ASP switched to using AWS native services, with the help of Cloudsoft for the planning, implementation and execution of these changes.
The Solutions
The key AWS Services used to replace Incapsula were:
- AWS WAF (web application firewall). This lets you define rules to allow or deny traffic to your application, which helps to block threats like SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. The AWS-managed rules is a great starting point to block common threats.
- AWS Shield helps to protect against DDoS, for example AWS thwarted the largest ever DDoS attack in February when it handled an attack rate of 2.3Tbps.
- AWS Global Accelerator is used for static IP addresses, an essential part of configuring the customer’s DNS records. These IP addresses are anycast, meaning that traffic from an end-user goes to the nearest AWS edge location and is then routed over the fast and reliable AWS network.
- AWS CloudFront is the Content Delivery Network, caching static data at the edge locations.
These services combined to give the cost savings, flexibility and simplified operations that ASP needed to continue delivering and improving their world-class service to existing and new customers.
About Cloudsoft
Cloudsoft is a cloud software and services company. As an AWS Advanced Consulting partner we help customers migrate to and improve their usage of AWS. For migrations, we help customers to prepare for and execute the migration - both the organisational change and the technical work required to make cloud adoption a success. For those already in the cloud, Cloudsoft offer a range of services: Well-Architected reviews to help with continual improvement, assistance with cloud cost optimisation and controls through FinOps and cost analysis, 24/7 support for your applications, modernisation (including Microsoft applications), and greenfield application development.
Next Steps
For a further comparison of AWS WAF and Imperva, see this Gartner comparison where AWS WAF has an overall score of 4.6 compared to 4.2 for Imperva.
If you’d like to discuss moving from your existing WAF provider to AWS, and about the specifics of your use-case, get in touch with Cloudsoft for a free consultation with one of our experienced solutions architects.