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Introduction to Alibaba Cloud Web Application Firewall

Introduction to Alibaba Cloud Web Application Firewall

Alibaba Cloud WAF is an Alibaba Group cloud-based Web Application Firewall service. Its purpose is to safeguard websites and web applications against malicious attacks, viruses, and other security threats. The WAF employs multiple layers of defense and powerful algorithms to detect and prevent cyberattacks from reaching your website or application.

One of the primary advantages of using Alibaba Cloud WAF is that it provides strong protection without the need for any hardware infrastructure. It operates in real time, providing near-instant detection and prevention of malicious traffic as well as preventing DDoS attacks from reaching your server.

Fig 1.1- Alibaba Cloud WAF

Benefits

  • Professional: offers rules created by Alibaba Cloud, deep learning powered by AI, proactive protection rules, and lets you write your own rules.
  • Stable: provides intelligent routing, multi-line and multi-node disaster recovery, safeguards services with millions of QPS, and permits millisecond reaction times.
  • Timely: within hours, instantly identifies and protects against the most recent online vulnerabilities, including zero-day vulnerabilities that Alibaba Cloud first made public.
  • Complete: assures data and account security, provides end-to-end protection against vulnerabilities, web attacks, and bot traffic, and complies with security O&M regulations.
  • Compliant: Meets PCI DSS and classified protection criteria, enhancing business security compliance construction.
  • Unparalleled threat intelligence: Delivers exclusive network-wide threat intelligence that has been gathered and updated from real-world Alibaba Cloud service scenarios.


The WAF also provides detailed analytics on the performance of your site, allowing you to see what visitors are doing and how your web applications are responding to requests.

Alibaba Cloud WAF is also very scalable. This means you can scale up or down based on demand without having to worry about purchasing additional hardware resources.

Furthermore, if your application has multiple subdomains or sites under different domains, you can configure multiple firewalls to provide different rules for each one, all from the same management dashboard.

The service also includes advanced features like customizable rules, rate limiting (which allows you to control the rate at which requests are accepted), IP blacklisting, automated bot detection and prevention tools, and several other powerful tools for preventing unwanted requests from reaching your site.

Furthermore, Alibaba Cloud WAF integrates seamlessly with other Alibaba products such as Data Guard Anti-DDoS Basic and Anti-DDoS Pro services.

Conclusion
Alibaba Cloud WAF is absolutely something to think about if you're searching for a simple approach to maintain the security of your web application while enjoying the scalability of cloud computing. It can be the ideal answer for the security requirements of your website or application thanks to its extensive collection of features and integrated tools.