Traditionally, Netscaler has been thought of and marketed as
an Application Delivery Controller or ADP and with good reason. Citrix has a
global IT presence and with the NetScaler appliance, many IT infrastructures
are leveraging the best APP Delivery Controller available today. Now Citrix has
done it, yet again, and has turned something great into something truly
awesome! That awesomeness is the NetScaler AppFirewall, which is only the best
kept technology secret offered on the market since 2013 and winner of the best
web application firewall for the year 2013. The NetScaler appliance has always
been called a Swiss army knife, with all of its features and possibilities,
while delivering stable and rock solid performance as an Application Delivery Controller,
NetScaler has always offered attractive features such as load balancing, global
load balancing, application and performance optimization to security features.
NetScaler AppFirewall takes all of that and transcends Application Delivery and
infrastructure security into one perfect package!
The NetScaler AppFirewall can be offered as a standalone
appliance or as part of the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) where various
models are fully integrated with each other. What does that mean exactly? Well
simply it means that object and policy sharing simplify administration, while
in turn system level process sharing ensures high performance by avoiding the
need for multi-pass packet processing. Integrating NetScaler into your IT infrastructure
means you want optimal security and be able to control the delivery of all
enterprise and cloud services for your company. And now with NetScaler
AppFirewall, not only will you be able to offer that, but also utilize
incredible security features and options to fine tune your application and
security offerings for your complete IT business needs.
Not only is the NetScaler AppFirewall a fully functional
ADC, its specialty is security and it has boatloads of security features
ranging from identity and access management, network infrastructure security,
and application security. NetScaler AppFirewall is based on a hybrid security
model that includes both a positive security model and a negative security
model. The positive security model delivers the following security features:
upfront protection for common cross site scripting, SQL injection attacks, as
well as various application logic attacks. The negative security model provides
protection against all known and unknown threats including: data protection, advanced
protections, as well as creating PCI compliance reports. Chew on this industry
factoid; 70% of successful internet attacks now exploit application
vulnerabilities, so you should strongly consider and take a close look at employing NetScaler
AppFirewall for your infrastructure before your company turns into the next
Target or Home Depot security breach.
Many IT infrastructures model their security through
countless layers of appliances and Admin GUI’s ranging from the common sense
measures of Microsoft Active Directory security groups and well as using Group
Policy Objects (GPO) coupled with a WebSense or IronPort (Cisco) appliance. You
will need many hands to manage multiple devices, GUI’s, and appliances that
require constant monitoring, whereas with the NetScaler AppFirewall, you can
leverage one appliance and one admin for the bulk of your company’s IT needs,
be it application delivery or security or in the real world, both! For my money
and my piece of mind, if I were the CIO or CTO of a company and needed the best front
line performance and back end defense to
ensure application delivery and infrastructure security, I would spend my money
on the Citrix NetScaler AppFirewall.
Labels: Citrix, Enterprise, Enterprise Mobility Solution, firewall, NetScaler, security, Web Application Proxy, Windows Firewall, XenApp, XenMobile