Solving WAFs biggest challenge | Impart Security

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What’s the biggest challenge with WAF?  It’s not a bypass. It’s all the operational details around getting a WAF operational in production. Inspector is Impart’s solution to that problem. We built Inspector to address some of the most persistent challenges security teams face when managing a WAF in production – deployment, rule management, and shared operational responsibility with engineering.

The Biggest WAF Challenges

Deployment Difficulties: WAFs have always been challenging to deploy because they sit in critical network workflows. Back in the day, appliance based WAFs required physical installation and network reconfiguration. While cloud-native infrastructure has simplified logistics, introducing a WAF into vital network paths remains complex due to the risks of service disruption and limited support for modern environments like containers, Kubernetes, and serverless architectures.

Too Hard to Manage Rules: Once deployed, updating WAF policies is often risky. Poorly configured rules can bring down production systems, resulting in significant revenue loss. Legacy WAF policies rely on massive libraries of regex patterns, leading to brittle and convoluted rule sets that are difficult to manage and even harder to adjust without specialized expertise. Even though some WAFs have tried to make this easier by packaging different rules into more abstract packages, customization and testingof these rules is still extremely difficult.

Shared Operational Responsibility: WAF ownership is often split across teams like application security, platform engineering, and network engineering. This disjointed ownership creates friction in environments where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is standard. Traditional WAFs still rely on manual processes and opaque configurations, making them out of sync with modern CI/CD workflows. As a result, most WAFs are operated in a fragmented manner – with an engineering team responsible for deploying and maintaining the WAF, with a security team responsible for managing the rules. Keeping consistency between these operational teams that operate with different processes is hard.

Inspector Solves the Biggest WAF Challenges

Inspector was created to tackle these problems head on.  Here’s how Inspector does it:

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Deployment

Inspector simplifies WAF deployment drastic

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