Leading global accounting platform provider Xero has selected Imperva Inc. to helping protect its business-critical data and applications in the cloud and on-premises. Xero will use the Imperva SecureSphere Web Application Firewall (WAF) and the Imperva ThreatRadar service to further safeguard its cloud-hosted applications from malicious web application attacks.
After experiencing a significant period of growth, Xero made the decision to move from legacy infrastructure to a cloud data-hosting environment.
“With more than one million subscribers, Xero is growing globally, and our infrastructure is scaling with it," says Aaron McKeown, head of Security Engineering and Architecture at Xero. "Protecting and defending our systems and environment against today’s sophisticated cyberattacks is of critical importance."
McKeown says that Xero needed a data-hosting environment that would enable it to scale to meet the demands of millions of customers and deliver consistent performance, even during the busiest times of the day.
"Imperva is helping us to protect and defend our systems without compromising speed or the deployment of innovative features,” he says.
Deploying Imperva SecureSphere further fortifies the layer of protection between Xero’s users and its application that protects them against the OWASP Top 10 web security risks. Imperva SecureSphere also enables the virtual patching of applications against new vulnerabilities as soon as they are discovered.
“Over the course of engaging with Imperva, we’ve developed a strong relationship with the organization where we see them more as a security partner rather than a vendor," McKeown says. "Imperva FlexProtect enables Xero the flexibility to deploy Imperva products when we need them and provides the team with the capability to accurately project costs. Imperva recognizes the importance and scale of the Xero platform, and the serious role they play in protecting it.”
Imperva SecureSphere WAF analyzes user access to business-critical web applications and protects these applications and the data they utilize against targeted web-based attacks. It learns what is considered “normal” behavior and correlates this with crowd-sourced threat intelligence from Imperva ThreatRadar, which includes IP reputation, bot mitigation and account takeover protection.
Morgan Gerhart, Imperva's VP, Product Marketing, says SecureSphere WAF will help Xero identify and act upon dangers maliciously woven into website traffic, enabling it to prevent breaches and downtime by protecting the data in their web applications and securing them against attacks.