Top Benefits of Web Application Firewalls (WAFs)
Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) aren’t new to the security scene – but they’re increasingly one of the most pivotal components to application security. A WAF, like its counterparts, relies on backend policies – rules that detect malicious requests and block the corresponding traffic. As such, a WAF’s key offering is the continuous automatic monitoring of user and service requests. This way, it can find suspicious activity, unexpected payloads, and active vulnerability exploits.
Unlike traditional firewalls that focus on network-level traffic, WAFs analyze application-specific behavior – such as form submissions, URL patterns, and API calls – to detect anomalies. They use rule-based logic, signature matching, and increasingly, machine learning to distinguish between legitimate and malicious traffic.
Once a threat is detected, WAFs can take various actions: blocking the request, alerting administrators, logging the event, or challenging users with tools like CAPTCHA. Policies can be tailored to the application’s risk profile, ensuring minimal disruption while maximizing protection.
The Top 3 Web Application Firewall Benefits
Because they sit between user requests and an application’s internal resources, WAF advantages represent a key avenue of data and user account control.
#1. SaaS Application Control
SaaS applications have become an integral component within modern workflows. However, unlike traditional software, SaaS apps are fully hosted on third-party infrastructure, limiting a customer’s ability to control their own web application security. This introduces significant risk.
WAFs help mitigate these risks by acting as a protective intermediary between users and SaaS services. One of their key functions is to serve as a virtual patch for vulnerabilities – especially those stemming from third-party code or open-source components. By filtering malicious traffic and blocking exploit attempts, WAFs buy valuable time for SaaS vendors to fix issues – and customers to install the necessary patches – without compromising user data or application integrity.
Advanced WAFs enhance this protection by using behavioral analysis to monitor and assess API-based interactions. These behavioral models can identify unusual patterns that may indicate abuse, such as automated scraping and token manipulation.
This functionality allows WAFs to defend against almost all OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and remote file inclusion—all of which are highly relevant to SaaS platforms. This makes WAFs a strategic piece of application layer protection for enterprises that rely on third-party SaaS solutions.
#2. User and Identity-Based Verification
WAFs play a crucial role in enforcing Identity and Access Management (IAM)-based security, especially in modern cloud environments like AWS and Azure. By integrating WAFs with IAM systems, organizations can implement fine-grained access controls that align with the principle of least privilege – ensuring users and services only have the access permissions that align with their role’s specific functions.
In practice, this integration allows administrators to enforce identity-based policies that define who can create, modify, or manage resources within an application. The WAF policies involved would assess the user’s provided role and seniority against the app’s given requirements. No member of the accounting team – for instance – should be requesting access to DevOps-specific software. It’s not just blatant instances of account takeover that WAFs help prevent: policies can include conditional statements, such as sending Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to an account that suddenly begins requesting a lot of application data all at once.
From an operational perspective, WAFs help the roll out of role-based access control (RBAC) across an organization’s full application landscape by only accepting RBAC-compliant users. The right WAF also makes this easy: integrating with your organization’s previously-existing IAM provider, such as Azure or Okta, allows for rapid and efficient enforcement. This is most often achieved via cloud-based WAF, as an on-premises WAF can be slower and more process-heavy to integrate.
#3. Regulatory Enforcement
For organizations striving to meet regulatory compliance mandates, particularly those focused on application-layer security, WAFs are a significant streamlining tool. Frameworks such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and SOX all emphasize the importance of protecting web applications from external threats – a requirement that WAFs are purpose-built to fulfill.
For instance, the release of PCI DSS 4.0 saw a key shift in regulatory demands – unlike previous versions, which allowed organizations to rely on periodic vulnerability scans, version 4.0 calls for continuous, automated protection of public-facing applications. Specifically, Requirement 6.4.1 provides two compliance paths: conducting regular manual or automated assessments, or deploying a WAF to actively block known vulnerabilities. While both are valid, the WAF route offers stronger, real-time enforcement.
Further tightening this standard, PCI DSS compliance now mandates the use of an always-on, automated mechanism that can monitor, log, and respond to web-based threats. WAFs fulfill this by providing dynamic threat detection, detailed logging for audit purposes, and customizable policies. It’s not just payment handlers that see this best-fit – GDPR and HIPAA demand similar visibility and automation capabilities. To protect all corners of an organization’s application demands, some deploy complex hybrid WAF solutions – but not all WAF security needs to be complicated.
Choose Next-Gen WAF Capabilities with Check Point CloudGuard
A WAF that intelligently assesses application traffic can lend a major boost to an organization’s public-facing and internal defenses. While some organizations see WAF challenges in the form of rule management, Check Point CloudGuard cuts the usual deployment and management demands – instead providing a WAF-as-a-Service model that deploys in minutes. See how CloudGuard has grown and developed as a WAF in our webinar.
Post-deployment, CloudGuard automatically monitors and classifies the APIs being used by an app – with a built-in database of expected API behaviors, it can flag instances of suspected API abuse, and automatically shut down exploitation attempts. Bring application security to the DevOps pipeline, as CloudGuard enforces correct API schema from deployment.
CloudGuard learns and incorporates an application’s network behavior into its policies. This brings zero day defenses into reach, and keeps applications secure even pre-patch installation. See it for yourself with a CloudGuard demo.
