Art of Defence Streamlines Cloud Application Security

PRESS RELEASE

San Francisco, RSA Conference, April 20, 2009 - As cloud infrastructure, platform and application providers race to capture market share, maintaining state-of-the-art security for these environments and applications becomes complicated and cumbersome. Today, Art of Defence, the leading distributed web application firewall (dWAF) provider, is launching the Hyperguard(tm) SaaS (software as a service) solution. The offering will enable cloud technology providers to easily offer new, comprehensive and flexible security solutions at the web application layer. Website operators will benefit from thorough protection without the hassle of back-end integration details. Art of Defence delivers the SaaS offering through a pay-per-use license model, ideal for today's cloud offering business models.

Hyperguard SaaS is built on Art of Defences patent-pending dWAF technology, ideally suited for the diverse platform and infrastructure scenarios required to deliver applications through a cloud. Using the Open Web Application Security Project's (OWASP) best practice recommendations as a starting point, Hyperguard adds high-level proactive security features typically not found in other WAF solutions, such as secure session management, URL encryption and a web authentication framework.

Protection levels are easily tightened iteratively without risk of unwanted exposure or blocking to the application being shielded. 'Detection only mode' allows new rule-sets to be tested but not enforced, alongside with existing rule-sets that enforce already proven security policies. Thus, administrators can develop, test and deploy new security policies time and again without ever relaxing the established defenses or risking false positives.

Hyperguards intelligent learning modes monitor site traffic and suggest new protection rules. Again, administrators can test these in shadow mode to ensure no false positives occur before deploying them to enforce the improved security policies. Further, Hyperguard helps customers to fulfill all PCI DSS's 1.2 compliance requirements for web application security.

"The market is eager to move to the cloud even those applications considered highly sensitive. Financial services, eCommerce, healthcare - they are all pushing cloud adoption and in turn placing increasing pressure on providers to make sure the applications are secure and meet compliance requirements," said Georg Hess, founder and CEO, Art of Defence GmbH. "Our goal is to lighten this burden from cloud providers and free them to continue to focus on developing innovative cloud applications or offer compelling platform or infrastructure services, and leave security to the experts."

In addition to the flexible offering for cloud technology providers, the Hyperguard SaaS solution is also available to website operators in three tiers.

Tier One: Entry-level Offering This level is tailored for web hosting providers and SMBs by providing baseline protection to cover a library of common attacks with real-time updates to the library by Art of Defence. Customers can also run this offering in 'detection only mode' for comprehensive attack detection without the risk of any interference of their web traffic through Hyperguard's transparent HTTP request / response cycle inspection.

Tier Two: Enterprise Offering This offering is ideally suited for most cloud application providers and enterprises. The full Hyperguard feature-set is available through this tier, including access to proactive security functions, easy-to-use filter wizards and automatic connection to third-party solutions such as security incident and event management (SIEM) systems.

Tier Three: Total Web Application Shielding Designed for meeting the highest security requirements, this offering includes the full Hyperguard solution plus custom set up and optimization by Art of Defence, tailored specifically for each unique use case and web application.

In addition to the SaaS offering, Hyperguard is available as a software plug-in for typical web infrastructure components (web and application servers, load balancers, reverse proxies, network firewalls, etc), as a virtual appliance or as a hardware appliance, through OEM and reseller channel partners in the U.S. Hyperguard's entire software architecture was carefully designed to ensure that it can be integrated as flexibly and seamlessly as possible into existing security and Web infrastructures with no disruptions or interference in service.

With this launch, Art of Defence brings the leading German offering to the global market. For more information about Hyperguard, the company or about partnership opportunities, visit the Art of Defence website (www.artofdefence.com/en).

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About Art of Defence GmbH Founded in 2005, Art of Defence GmbH is headquartered in Regensburg, Germany, and serves the U.S., European and Asian markets. Focused exclusively on providing comprehensive web application security technology on any scale, the company is the only European provider in this space that covers the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC). The company partners with leading technology providers like Microsoft, Zeus, GeNUA, and Armorize.

Key offerings include Hyperguard(tm), a distributed web application firewall (dWAF), Hypersource(tm), a static source code analysis tool, and Hyperscan(tm), a web application vulnerability scan server.

Art of Defences web application firewall technology is the most flexible on the market toady, available as a SaaS, software plug-ins, virtual appliances, hardware appliances or as standalone software solutions. The company serves the financial services, eCommerce, technology, telecommunication and public sector markets exclusively through OEM/technology and reseller channel partners.

For more information about Art of Defence, visit: www.artofdefence.com/en