Citrix Gateway vs. Imperva Web Application Firewall (WAF)

Citrix Gateway is also a great browser or alternate browser if you need a more search engine for your research and other important things to know. It is perfect for your browsing experience and I highly recommend Citrix to my colleagues and friends. For me, this tool is really useful and I believe to others too.

If you are looking for a cheap product to meet the bare minimum requirements for PCI or any other compliance regulations, this is not the product. Also, the WAF portion only inspects on HTTP/HTTPS traffic which can be very limiting into other forms of web apps that utilize other protocols. The HTTP/HTTPS inspection that it does do is very in depth and well worth the investment.

Incentivized

• Citrix Netscaler Gateway is a solid front end for any organizations externally facing infrastructure. Nothing is impenetrable but Netscaler is as close to it as you can get.
• Netscaler is high on available customization so it can be used by both small shops and large shops in that it offers opportunity to change most parts of the system to your liking.
• In blending well with Citrix Xenapp and Xendesktop systems, Netscaler is particularly strong in protecting other Citrix products. Both the Netscaler and the Xen systems have hooks built into them to best use each other.

Incentivized

• Alert Aggregation - Correlates different violations into perceived correlated attacks.
• Ease of deployment - as one of the only WAFs that allow bridge mode deployment, this can be deployed with without downtime and no Network Architecture modifications. If the need for proxy is required at a later time, Transparent Reverse Proxy can be deployed within seconds and minimal configuration.
• Custom Policies - Custom security policies are easy to configure.
• Reporting - There are a good amount of pre-configured reports available by default.

Incentivized

• One main opportunity that I want to be improved is to lessen the lag and errors in using Citrix.
• We wish to reduce support request with self service password resets.
• We would also want to lessen authentication to involve less administration.

Incentivized

• The UI can use a little work (but is largely decent)

There are just a couple of points that are hard to find, that probably could be elsewhere. But these are minor; everything else is right where you'd expect it to be.

Support is pretty good and pretty fast to respond. I can't say I can really complain about the support experience I've had with them, as they've resolved issues within a reasonable time-frame. Of course, they could always be faster and better, but I think for what we pay, it's well worth the money.

Incentivized

We haven't needed support from Imperva since implementation. But during that time, their personnel were very quick to respond to questions. Since then, it's been largely doing its thing for us (which is exactly what we'd hoped).

We chose Citrix Netscaler Gateway for its wide market presence and its great experience over time. Although the implementation time may be longer than in the other solutions, I think the results are better and it allows configuration with greater capacity than the others. The cost is similar in all the solutions seen.

Incentivized

Ultimately, it was the easiest to work with that was still a "known" company (we've been burned too many times by up-and-comers). We needed something that gave us a lot of control but then didn't need its handheld on a daily basis. Imperva gives us a lot of that and we are still able to navigate it with ease.

• we moved from Cisco to Citrix VPN, and no longer had to worry about certificate issues
• profile issues from Cisco were no longer a problem with Citrix.
• the amount of time PER VPN call dropped significantly in the internal helpdesk, however, the volume of calls stayed the same.

Incentivized

• Our on-prem firewall has less work to do, allowing it more cycles for other tasks.
• We have better web traffic visibility and control over what actors are doing outside our network.