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 testing of 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:
Deployment
Inspector simplifies WAF deployment drastically. With just a few annotations in your preferred IaC tools, Inspector integrates seamlessly into your environment. It supports multiple deployment patterns unified under a single management plane, providing a holistic view of your attack surface alongside detailed performance metrics. For even greater ease, our AI assistant, Installer, automates much of the deployment process, and what's better, Inspector only requires a single binary to ingest and analyze multiple forms of data, including logs, live traffic, and even eBPF syscalls.
WAF Rule Management
Inspector redefines WAF policy management by making it intuitive and efficient. Policies are stored and managed as code in a WebAssembly DSL and visualized as a rule graph, and because the rules are dynamically loaded and API aware, do not require as much maintenance or customization because they can automatically tailor their policies for different endpoints or datatypes. This allows security teams to quickly understand rule dependencies and overall policy structure. Inspector also offers multiple configuration methods, such as:
- Dynamic updates to ACL lists via API, console, ChatOps, or Terraform.
- Rule recommendations that can make rules more accurate and optimized , reducing false positives.
- AI generated rules that are created using a prompt and Impart's Rule DSL definitions.
Unified IaaC Workflows
Inspector provides first-class support for IaC workflows, enabling teams to manage WAF policies alongside other infrastructure. Security and engineering teams can collaborate through peer-reviewed pull requests, regression tests, and build processes that incorporate WAF rule validation. This approach ensures that WAF policies are treated with the same rigor and transparency as other infrastructure components, eliminating the need for bespoke processes.
Ready to experience the future of WAF management? Try Impart now!. Your security posture is about to get a serious upgrade—let the WAF Assistants show you the power of collaboration.