Akamai to Incapsula – Four Reasons to Make the Move

There are many reasons why former Akamai customers are migrating to Imperva Incapsula. Other features being more or less equal between Incapsula and Akamai, let’s focus on four areas of differentiation, where Incapsula offers:

• Better DDoS protection
• More robust website security
• Superior dynamic caching (website optimization)
• Advanced load balancing

For a complete view of what is available when you make the switch to Incapsula, read the Akamai to Incapsula Migration Guide.

Better DDoS Protection — Both Incapsula and Akamai offer protection against the largest volumetric attacks, full application layer visibility, mitigation of DNS server attacks and protection of non-web infrastructure services (FTP, SMTP, VOIP, etc.).

Beyond these basic capabilities, Incapsula has substantially raised the bar. We defend origin IP addresses against DDoS assaults. Our immediate, always-on detection mitigates application layer DDoS attacks with < 0.01% false positives. All the while Incapsula offers you real-time visibility and control.

Custom security rules can provide for a faster response and more flexible enforcement of your organizations’ security policies and use cases. The IncapRules is a proprietary scripting language that lets you implement your own security and access control rules—on demand—on top of our existing security logic. A dedicated GUI makes custom rule creation a self-service process, with rules being propagated system-wide within 60 seconds. All of this is included in our service agreement.

Contrast this with the turnaround time for rule creation and propagation across Akamai’s network, a process that can take days or weeks.

When considering protection on a global scale, Incapsula leads in this regard, too. Our content delivery network (CDN) is comprised of 26 DDoS scrubbing centers.

More Robust Website Security – The proprietary, PCI-compliant web application firewall (WAF) from Incapsula consistently leads in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, “the go-to resource for an objective perspective on technology and service markets. ” Our sophisticated, client classification algorithms mitigate advanced bots. And the Incapsula solution’s backdoor protection guards against potential malware infection.

Dynamic Caching – Many Akamai customers have split their apps in such a way that static content is sent to one subdomain, dynamic traffic to another. Static content is then routed through its CDN, with dynamic content being neither accelerated nor secured. Some Akamai clients use its Dynamic Site Accelerator to support dynamic content caching which continuously pulls and caches fresh content onto servers located close to end users, relying heavily on network optimization and compression techniques to reduce latency.

In contrast, Incapsula was built from the ground up to support dynamic content delivery, using intelligent caching methods to provide a comprehensive acceleration solution. Our advanced traffic profiling algorithms auto-identify and cache dynamically-generated content, and then serve it directly from memory. Content is also periodically refreshed based on user-defined cache settings. Page load times and server loads are significantly reduced.

With Incapsula there is no need to break out traffic by type (dynamic/static); content is stored and fetched as needed. This greatly reduces complexity.

Advanced Load Balancing – Both Incapsula and Akamai offer global server load balancing. But again, Incapsula goes further—particularly in relation to the application layer. Here we offer local server load balancing, site failover and real-time health monitoring.

In addition to advanced technology, we make migration easy.

Deployment – Adding SSL support to Akamai can take up to one month. Conversely, setting up SSL certificate support is simple, fast and free when migrating to Incapsula. You can upload your own SSL certificate using our self-service customer portal, or generate a new certificate through us. Propagation usually occurs within 24 hours.

For easier deployment in many environments, we offer productized SIEM integration with premade dashboards—yet another differentiation.

Find out how our Migration Guide can help you plan for a seamless transition to the Incapsula solution.