We recently discussed Imperva’s vision for the future of application security, where we also covered the Imperva Security Engine. This innovative application security framework is powering up the next generation of Imperva solutions, the first of which is Imperva Elastic WAF.
This blog is the first in a series of deep-dive blogs into Elastic WAF. And what better way to start than to have your most pressing questions answered? So, grab your favorite drink and a snack (or both), sit back, and get ready to dive in, as there’s a lot to unpack. Let’s get started!
What is Imperva Elastic WAF?
Elastic WAF brings Imperva’s industry-leading Cloud WAF to modern application environments, containerized and ready to deploy anywhere your applications live, providing our best-of-breed security directly within your deployment environment.
Elastic WAF is CDN-agnostic, cloud-agnostic, and cloud-native. It provides SaaS-based centralized management while keeping enforcement local to your environment, giving you complete control without the complexity of self-hosting everything.
Why does Imperva offer multiple WAF deployment options?
That is a great question. Imperva’s approach to Web Application Firewall (WAF) is rooted in providing our customers with complete flexibility regarding how they want to deploy and manage their security. Rather than offering separate WAF products, Imperva delivers a single, market-leading WAF platform with multiple deployment options to meet customers where they are: whether on-premises, in the cloud, or in modern DevOps environments.
WAF Gateway: Designed for customers with strict data residency requirements or air-gapped environments, Imperva WAF Gateway is deployed as a physical appliance or virtual machine on-premises. It gives complete control to the customer, who is also responsible for deployment and management via a self-managed console, making it ideal for highly regulated industries.
Cloud WAF: Ideal for customers who want a simple, no-hassle security solution that doesn’t require managing infrastructure. Deployed as a multi-tenant SaaS solution on Imperva’s global PoP network, it’s fully managed by Imperva and centrally controlled through the Cloud Security Console, offering quick setup and broad protection.
Elastic WAF: Elastic WAF is built for organizations running applications in modern environments. It runs as a pod within Kubernetes and can protect any environment, deploying alongside applications in the same public or private cloud. This gives customers flexibility and control while benefiting from centralized management through the Imperva Cloud Security Console.
How does Elastic WAF meet customers where they are today?
With modern application development, deployment, and architecture fundamentally changing the landscape, Elastic WAF was designed to meet the customer needs resulting from these changes, including:
- Moving Security Closer to Applications: Cloud-native infrastructure has fundamentally changed how we secure applications in modern environments. Perimeter-based approaches are no longer sufficient in a world where workloads are distributed across hybrid environments. Elastic WAF moves security closer to applications by modernizing what local deployments should look like. This provides the real-time, agile protection that modern, dynamic environments demand.
- Unifying Security Visibility and Policy Enforcement Across Environments: Fragmented security ownership within organizations and siloed tools lead to policy gaps and visibility blind spots. Elastic WAF centralizes management and enforcement across on-premises, cloud, and containerized applications by leveraging the Imperva Cloud Security Console, strengthening security posture and simplifying operations.
- Balancing Security and Agility in Modern DevOps Workflows: Development teams need to ship fast, but not at the expense of security. Elastic WAF is purpose-built for cloud-native environments and integrates directly into DevOps workflows, preventing last-minute delays and maintaining velocity from build to deployment. It ensures security does not become a bottleneck that slows down deployments.
- Scaling Security for APIs and Microservices: Modern applications are becoming increasingly distributed, making securing APIs and microservices complex. Elastic WAF is designed to scale with these architectures, delivering coverage without added overhead.
- Flexibility and Control Across Security Models: Unlike bundled CDN-WAF offerings, Elastic WAF is CDN-agnostic and architecture-agnostic, allowing customers to pair best-in-class protection with any CDN they choose or no CDN at all. It also supports local data plane deployment with SaaS-based management, giving teams maximum flexibility.
What are the key use cases for which Elastic WAF was designed?
- Enhancing security for non-Imperva CDN users: For organizations using a non-Imperva CDN and underserved by its native security, Elastic WAF offers a powerful, independent alternative that strengthens protection without requiring architecture changes.
- Local data protection with SaaS-based control: For organizations in heavily regulated industries that require on-premises data processing due to compliance, performance, or sovereignty concerns, but still want SaaS-based centralized management. Elastic WAF offers the best of both worlds.
- Supporting hybrid environments: For organizations operating across cloud and on-prem deployments that need consistent policies and visibility, Elastic WAF delivers a unified security posture and management, no matter where apps are hosted.
- Empowering DevOps autonomy: For DevOps teams that want to move fast without friction from security policies, Elastic WAF decouples security deployment from governance, allowing DevOps to deploy protection independently. Default policies from the CISO are automatically enforced – no firewall change requests or manual approvals required.
- Simplifying complex security architectures: For organizations managing multiple environments (e.g., on-prem, multi-cloud) that face fragmented security controls. Elastic WAF reduces this complexity while increasing agility and protection.
What will customers appreciate most about Elastic WAF?
There’s a lot to love about Elastic WAF. It’s not just a new way to deploy WAF; it’s a more innovative, agile approach to security. Customers will appreciate how it bridges the gap between enterprise-grade security and real-world operational flexibility without compromising one for the other. But it’s not just about the protection it delivers; it’s how it fits into their workflows:
- Automated, instant protection: Elastic WAF protects applications from the moment they’re deployed, without needing to onboard each one manually, providing Imperva’s industry-leading security with near-zero false positives.
- Truly architecture-agnostic deployment: Elastic WAF doesn’t lock you into a specific stack or CDN; it deploys alongside your apps, wherever they run.
- Frictionless collaboration between DevOps and Security: Elastic WAF minimizes the need for back-and-forth coordination. Default policies from security leadership are enforced automatically, empowering developers to work autonomously.
- Granular control, microservice by microservice: Security can be tailored per service, giving teams precision without added complexity.
- Future-ready integration with the Imperva ecosystem: As Imperva continues expanding integrations into the Security Engine, customers can expect even more value and protection from the same lightweight footprint.
What sets Elastic WAF apart from competing WAF solutions?
As a recognized leader in the WAF industry, Imperva employs a holistic and comprehensive approach to deploying Web Application Firewalls, uniquely enabling organizations to protect their applications seamlessly across on-premises, edge, and cloud-native environments.
Unlike WAF solutions that require specific CDNs or DNS configurations, Elastic WAF integrates with any environment, whether on-premises, hybrid cloud, or multi-cloud, without vendor lock-in. It offers a standalone, containerized solution that works alongside Kubernetes, microservices, and modern DevOps architectures.
While some vendors offer WAF solutions with a similar containerized, architecture-agnostic approach, none match Imperva’s two decades of experience in securing web applications. Imperva is a 9-time leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and was recently named a Leader in The Forrester Wave
: Web Application Firewall Solutions, Q1 2025.
Imperva has also been named a Leader in the SecureIQLab 2025 Cloud WAAP CyberRisk Comparative Validation Report for the fourth time in a row. These are just a few accolades highlighting Imperva’s application security superiority.
But it’s not just about accolades, as we believe real-world customer data speaks volumes. Imperva provides market-leading protection out of the box, unlike many WAF solutions that require constant tuning and adjustments. 97% of our customers use default policies, and 95% run in blocking mode without disruption. The Imperva Threat Research team rigorously tests security rules before deployment, ensuring near-zero false positives while delivering precise, automated protection.
Lastly, while some competitors’ deployments can take days, Elastic WAF can be deployed in under 5 minutes.
How does Elastic WAF reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO)?
Elastic WAF reduces your TCO by improving operational efficiency through:
- Low maintenance & near-zero false positives: Works out of the box with managed security rules, reducing manual tuning and minimizing disruptions caused by false positives.
- Support for agile development: Elastic WAF works with automation tools, APIs, and IaC to simplify setup and updates. This helps teams add security quickly without slowing down releases.
- Elastic scalability: Adapts dynamically to traffic fluctuations and infrastructure changes, ensuring security scales efficiently without increasing administrative burden.
- Reduced security silos: Consolidates application security across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, streamlining policy enforcement and reducing the risk of inconsistencies.
- Centralized security management: Provides a unified dashboard for managing security policies across on-prem, cloud, and containerized environments, reducing complexity and overhead.
How does Elastic WAF empower agile development without compromising security?
Elastic WAF empowers DevOps teams to move fast without being slowed down by traditional security processes. It decouples security deployment from governance, so developers can deploy protection independently, while security-defined policies are automatically enforced. No manual onboarding, firewall change requests, or approvals required.
Built for cloud-native environments, Elastic WAF:
- Runs natively in Kubernetes, right alongside your applications.
- Protects apps from the moment they’re deployed, with no architecture changes.
- Enables setup in under 5 minutes with minimal compute consumption and ultra-low latency.
- Provides fine-tuned protection rules per microservice.
- Offers centralized, SaaS-based management for unified visibility and consistent policy enforcement across environments.
Elastic WAF makes security a built-in part of agile development by allowing developers to maintain velocity and CISOs to retain governance. Expect a deeper dive into how Elastic WAF integrates into DevOps workflows in the coming months.
Does Elastic WAF integrate with other Imperva services?
- Powered by the Imperva Security Engine: Elastic WAF is built on the same core engine as Imperva Cloud WAF and API Security, ensuring deep integration and consistent policy enforcement. Because it is based on the Imperva Security Engine, Elastic WAF works alongside other Imperva services, ensuring consistent security policy enforcement, centralized monitoring, and streamlined operations across diverse environments for all your Imperva-protected sites.
- Future ecosystem integrations (coming soon): In addition to the unified management and visibility, we are actively working on integrating the greater Imperva Application Security ecosystem into the Security Engine. Soon, Client-Side Protection, Advanced Bot Protection, and Client-Side Protection will be integrated into the Imperva Security Engine to provide customers with comprehensive protection against API abuse, bot attacks, and client-side threats, all from a single platform.
How does Elastic WAF handle hybrid security environments?
Elastic WAF is designed to secure hybrid environments by unifying security policy enforcement across on-premises, cloud, and containerized deployments. This ensures consistent protection without the gaps that arise from fragmented security models. With centralized security management, organizations can monitor and enforce security policies from a single interface, reducing operational complexity while enhancing visibility across diverse infrastructures.
Elastic WAF also offers customizable security rules tailored to each environment or domain, allowing DevOps and security teams to fine-tune protection without disrupting workflows. Its frictionless deployment model ensures integration into modern environments, making it easy to scale security across hybrid and multi-cloud architectures. Additionally, consolidated event monitoring provides real-time insights, helping teams detect and respond to threats more efficiently, unlike siloed solutions that limit visibility across cloud vendors.
How does Elastic WAF work?
Elastic WAF deploys locally within your Kubernetes cluster in less than 5 minutes (more on the deployment process later). It then integrates with your ingress controllers, reverse proxies, API gateways, or load balancers to inspect traffic. Once traffic starts flowing to the application(s):
- The integration component forwards each request to a local controller, which runs a local Security Engine (a containerized version of Imperva’s Cloud WAF) to detect threats.
- The Imperva Security Engine analyzes the traffic for threats.
- The Security Engine constantly syncs with the Imperva Cloud to keep security rules and configurations up to date.
- Security events are logged both locally and to the Imperva Cloud Security Console.
- Based on the Security Engine’s findings, Elastic WAF acts (block, alert, or allow).
Elastic WAF provides scalable, low-latency protection across cloud-native environments by distributing security inspection across multiple instances within a cluster. Expect a technical deep dive into Elastic WAF in the coming months.
How do you deploy Elastic WAF?
Elastic WAF can be deployed using multiple methods to fit different infrastructure needs. Users can deploy via Imperva’s UI for a guided setup or use the CLI for more flexibility and automation. It integrates with Istio Ingress Gateway, NGINX Ingress Controller, Envoy Proxy, Envoy Gateway, and Kong Ingress Controller, allowing security enforcement within existing traffic management frameworks. These options ensure Elastic WAF adapts to cloud-native, containerized, and hybrid environments with minimal operational friction. Expect a deeper dive into deployment in the coming months.
What platform integrations does Elastic WAF support?
Why do we utilize Kubernetes technology?
Deploying Elastic WAF within Kubernetes offers several advantages, including scalability, automation, and efficient traffic inspection. Kubernetes orchestrates containerized applications, ensuring Elastic WAF can scale dynamically with workloads while integrating with ingress controllers like NGINX or AWS ALB to filter malicious traffic at the entry point. By automating deployment and security policy updates, Kubernetes helps maintain consistent, real-time protection across all application instances.
Kubernetes also enables Elastic WAF to leverage container technology and highly efficient code execution, optimizing security processing to add less than a fraction of a millisecond of latency per request. This is achieved through lightweight, high-performance architecture designed for cloud-native environments. Additionally, Kubernetes’ monitoring and logging capabilities provide deep insights into attack patterns and vulnerabilities, enhancing threat response while maintaining minimal performance overhead.
That said, while Elastic WAF requires a Kubernetes cluster for deployment (as the hosting platform), it is not limited to protecting only Kubernetes-based applications.
Does Elastic WAF impact application performance and latency?
Not at all. Elastic WAF is engineered for high efficiency, ensuring minimal impact on application performance and latency:
- Adds less than 1ms of latency per request
- Uses a container-friendly architecture that minimizes resource usage
- Scales dynamically when needed (spins up new engines in under three seconds)
- Works with over 70% of traffic management solutions on the market
Expect to hear more soon, in a dedicated blog about how Elastic WAF optimizes performance for ultra-low latency applications.
When will Elastic WAF be available?
Elastic WAF is now available.
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