Incapsula - Essential Cloud based Security Solution for your Website

Over 2011-2012 we've seen an increase in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and other web attacks on SME's websites. Incapsula is one of the companies whose service is useful to protect your website from all threats and mitigate DDoS attacks which affect your websites, servers, databases, and other essential infrastructure.

Incapsula is a cloud-based website security and performance service, including a PCI-certified cloud web application firewall and a content delivery network (CDN) for small and medium-sized businesses.

We at 'The Hacker News' got the chance to review the service using an Enterprise plan account. Really it takes I think 1-2 minutes to join the service and add this extra layer of virtual shield around your Website. You have to make a simple DNS settings change in your domain panel. Your site traffic is then routed through Incapsula's global network of high-powered servers. Incoming traffic is analyzed and a security layer is added to block a wide-range of threats.

Incapsula's has 3 levels of security:

1. Bot access control: Incapsula's unique bot detection technology analyzes any bot trying to access your website, and prevents "bad bots" as comment spammers, fake registrations, site scrapers

2. A cloud-based, Web Application Firewall service that provides protection against OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities as SQL Injection, Cross Site Sripting, etc.: Incapsula has standard checklist for application security mitigation. It takes five minutes to set up Incapsula's WAF without installing any hardware, software or making changes to the site. It keeps you up to date on the most recent and malicious attacks out there and has defenses against them. Something else that we found useful is their advanced security settings. These give you complete control over the security for your website: for example you can blacklist or whitelist IP's and user agents.

3. DDoS mitigation service: Incapsula's worldwide network of multi-gigabit scrubbing centers and unique bot (automation) detection technology, provides complete protection for both network (Layer 3 & 4) and application level (Layer 7)

DDoS attacks.

The service filters attack traffic using active micro challenges, browser diagnostics and passive network-based techniques that inspect connection, device and behavioral attributes.Another advantage is that Incapsula's scurity team monitors attacks and is available on-demand 24X7 to ensure the site is up and running and performing optimally.

PCI Compliance

An important aspect of the service is that it is in compliance with the Payment Card Industry data security standard (PCI) which is essential for online merchants. Incapsula, the ONLY cloud-based Web Application Firewall (WAF) for SMBs certified by the PCI Security Standards Council, delivers cost-effective compliance with PCI DSS requirement 6.6 and also provides PCI reports.

Performance

The one key element that most owners of a website or blog is interested in is that of performance. Incapsula's Content Delivery Network (CDN) improves your site's performance by over 40% with unique and adaptive caching, and intelligent content optimization. With a network of globally distributed servers, they are able to improve page load time and by that – improve user experience on your site and SEO ranking.

How does the acceleration work?

Incapsula caches your static content, such as HTML files, images or Javascript resources, so that they can be served directly from Incapsula's data centers on demand.

Incapsula will also use its patent-pending behavior analysis technology to identify dynamically-generated content for Caching purposes. The system's heuristic process will recognize un-personalized Cacheable objects and use this information to generate an optimized set of new Caching rules, causing a significant 30% to 40% additional improvement in a dynamic website's performance. To assure content freshness, Incapsula will constantly review these rules and updated them, as needed. Finally, Incapsula will also make your life easier by auto-performing different optimization tasks like CSS and JS source code magnification, Gzipping of any un-Zipped objects and etc.

Incapsula Plans

There are currently 4 plans that Incapsula offers. The company offers a free service for sites with less than 50 GB of monthly bandwidth, and paid plans start at $9/month. For most personal sites, and small commercial sites, you can sign up for the "Free " plan, which is FREE. If you need advanced acceleration – the "Personal" plan will best match your needs. And if you need Enterprise-grade security and 24X7 dedicated support, the we will recommend to get the Business or Enterprise plans. To sign up to Incapsula, go to: www.incapsula.com

Conclusion : Incapsula offers an ideal solution for website owners, webmasters and also website service provided, that are looking for maximum security and performance for free or an affordable price.

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