Fastly Cloud Security

Fastly's cloud security solutions address the critical challenge of protecting web applications, APIs, and microservices from various threats, including DDoS attacks, bot traffic, and Layer 7 vulnerabilities.

At the core of Fastly's security architecture is the Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (WAF), which provides comprehensive protection against OWASP Top 10 web application security risks and advanced threats such as account takeover, malicious bots, and API abuse. The WAF leverages Fastly's proprietary SmartParse technology, which tokenizes request payloads for highly accurate detection and mitigation of malicious traffic, unlike traditional WAFs that rely on regular-expression pattern matching.

Fastly DDoS Protection is another key component, offering automatic and scalable defense against distributed denial-of-service attacks. This solution utilizes Fastly's global network, which boasts over 350 Tbps of capacity, to absorb and mitigate massive network layer attacks. The Attribute Unmasking technique helps in detecting and mitigating application DDoS attacks without requiring manual intervention or configuration, ensuring that legitimate traffic is not impacted.

Operational considerations include the ease of deployment, with options for edge, cloud, or hybrid SaaS deployments, and integrations with DevOps and security toolchains to streamline security workflows. The solution is designed for minimal tuning, allowing immediate protection with near-zero configuration. Additionally, Fastly's security services include 24/7 support from their Customer Security Operations Center, ensuring rapid response to critical security incidents within a 15-minute SLA.

From a technical standpoint, Fastly's API Security features provide visibility and protection for API traffic, supporting various API protocols including GraphQL. The platform offers customizable rules for blocking, allowing, tagging, or rate-limiting API traffic, and integrates with IP reputation feeds like NLX to preemptively defend against known malicious activity.

Overall, Fastly's cloud security solutions are built to provide real-time visibility, proactive protection, and scalable defenses, making them highly effective in maintaining the performance and availability of web applications and APIs.