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Container-based web applications built on microservices architecture, whether public-facing or internal, are critical to businesses. This new class of applications is commonly referred to as cloud-native applications. Read on to find out why traditional WAFs are no longer enough to protect cloud-native applications and how Calico’s new workload-centric WAF solves this problem.
Background
HTTP is the lingua franca for modern, RESTful APIs and microservices communication. Traditionally, organizations have deployed WAF at the perimeter level to protect web applications against external attacks. A WAF provides visibility and enforces security controls on external traffic that passes through it. However, for cloud-native applications, where the concept of a perimeter does not exist, the same visibility and control need to be provided at the workload level inside the cluster.
In a survey conducted by information security research center Ponemon Institute to probe the state of the WAF market, more than 600 respondents noted the following:
- 86% of organizations experienced application-layer attacks that bypassed their WAF in the last 12 months.
- While 66% of respondents consider WAF to be an important security tool, over 40% use their WAFs only to generate alerts (not to block attacks).
Source: Ponemon Institute – “The State of Web Application Continue reading