With Akamai's Web Application Firewall, Kona Site Defender, we are able to protect websites and APIs from sophisticated attacks. These are attacks that are coordinated in organized groups with the backing of resources not available in the common criminal underworld. In some cases, the found attack signatures suggest the attackers’ knowledge of DDoS mitigation technology.

Performance Cloud can not only protect your website from these DDoS attacks but are also able to protect your websites & API’s against web-application and direct-to origin attacks.

When an attack is executed, it is possible that your online platform becomes unreachable, or maybe even that your application is hacked. Unreachable means the site is no longer accessible from the Internet; Hacked as in 'bad actor' is able to access your server.

There can be a plethora of consequences involved with a hack of your website. To be more specific, you can think of the following issues that can appear:

• The outage of your online platform;
• Loss of productivity, for example, an online portal;
• The turnover decline, if it concerns a webshop;
• Reputation damage to the brand of your company;
• Data theft.

The Akamai Web Application Firewall is deployed at the edges of the network, far away from your platforms and sites residing in your cloud. It is at the edges of the platform where the software for the services are deployed, which for example are software for Content Delivery, SSL, and Web Application Firewall.

The web application firewall of Akamai comes with another advantage: It is a cloud solution, and a big benefit over hardware-based firewalls is, that with our solution we are able to protect all your clouds and datacenters!

We are able to protect your public cloud applications, while at the same time we can protect your on-premise datacenter. This is perhaps the biggest benefit of all: With this solution, we are able to help reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO) of your platform by replacing the classic, sometimes hardware-based WAF solutions with a single centrally managed and cloud-based WAF.

For setting up your WAF, it is necessary that your website is connected to the internet. Naturally, we will use the https protocol instead of HTTP. Https is a secured version of HTTP: Communication between the end-user and the website is encrypted. It helps prevent intruders from tampering with the communication between the end-users browsers and the website. Every site that is not protected with https can reveal information about the identity and behavior of end-users.

We configure a website preferably with a Domain Validated SSL-certificate. We also need support from your DNS administrator to CNAME your website to the Akamai platform. Let us prepare the basic configuration in the Akamai platform with the certified professionals at our hosting team. Once this is done, we are ready to go.

It is at the edges of the Akamai platform where the logic takes place: when we have configured the firewall, traffic is re-routed via the DNS change and we will let the web application firewall learn for the first weeks to come. We call this alert-mode: The firewall is not active, but it will report on what it sees.

On a daily basis we will check configurations, and only if we are sure that we can enable the firewall without impacting the customers’ business, we will activate the firewall: we call this deny-mode. Once activated we have good reporting available on our dashboard, with a possibility to send out logs and reports.

It is important to take the right technical measures to protect your digital platform against attacks. Invest in a good Web Application Firewall (WAF). We have extensive experience with protecting online platforms, in collaboration with Akamai.

If you want a quick start, contact us. If you are under attack? We can help quickly, without doing the paperwork first. Let’s first make sure that your business is safe! If you have any questions feel free to contact our consultant Hosting & Security Bas Greevink.