Scaling WAF Protection Across Multi-Cloud Environments with open-appsec

As organizations embrace the flexibility and resilience of multi-cloud and hybrid architectures, a new challenge emerges: how do you consistently secure web applications across environments that differ in infrastructure, tooling, and network policies?

Traditional perimeter-based security models — and even legacy Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) — struggle to keep up. That's where open-appsec comes in.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how open-appsec enables seamless, scalable WAF protection across diverse cloud environments — without adding complexity or slowing you down.

The Reality of Multi-Cloud Security

Multi-cloud architectures are increasingly common for a reason:

• You avoid vendor lock-in

• You can optimize for cost, performance, or availability

• You support diverse business units or global teams

  
  

But they also create security fragmentation:

• Different WAFs per cloud mean inconsistent policies

• Varying integration models increase setup time and overhead

• Monitoring and alerting are siloed, complicating incident response

  
  

Security teams need a unified way to deploy, manage, and update protection across AWS, Azure, GCP, and even on-prem.

How open-appsec Solves This

open-appsec is designed for scale and consistency:

Cloud-Native by Design

Whether you run Kubernetes on EKS, AKS, GKE — or self-hosted — open-appsec deploys as a lightweight agent on your existing reverse proxy (like NGINX, APISIX, Kong, Envoy). No hardware appliances, no cloud lock-in.

Consistent Policy Across Environments

Define your policies once, and apply them across all agents — regardless of where they’re hosted. With the cloud-managed UI, managing global policy is a breeze.

Flexible Deployment Options

You can:

• Deploy declaratively managed on Kubernetes, Docker  and Linux for fully locally-managed setups

• Use Docker Compose on Docker or Helm on Kubernetes for repeatable installs

Unified Visibility

Using the optional management portal, you get centralized visibility into events, logs, and trends — even if assets and open-appsec WAF deployments live in different clouds.

ML-Based Protection That Adapts to Each Environment

open-appsec uses behavior-based machine learning to understand traffic patterns in each environment individually — without requiring separate tuning per cloud.

Example Use Case

A global SaaS provider hosts its frontend on AWS, its API on GCP, and a legacy service on Azure. With open-appsec:

• They deploy the same WAF logic via Helm in each Kubernetes cluster

• Logs from all regions are available in a unified cloud UI

• Threat detection and prevention adapts locally to each workload’s behavior

• They avoid the cost and complexity of multiple proprietary WAF licenses

Built for Modern Teams

open-appsec empowers:

• Platform engineers to deliver effective WAF protection across clouds

• Security teams to set global policies and reduce manual tuning

• DevOps teams to embed protection into CI/CD pipelines

Ready to Scale?

Whether you're migrating, modernizing, or just growing fast — open-appsec gives you the flexibility, visibility, and protection you need to scale securely across any cloud.

Start your multi-cloud WAF journey on AWS, Azure, GCP and beyond with open-appsec Getting Started Docs and check out our ready-to-use playground environments.

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open-appsec is an open-source project that builds on machine learning to provide pre-emptive web app & API threat protection against OWASP-Top-10 and zero-day attacks. It simplifies maintenance as there is no threat signature upkeep and exception handling, like common in many WAF solutions. 

More information about open-appsec's Learning Levels can be found here. 

To achieve the best Threat Prevention results of the ML engine, read this blog. 

To learn more about how open-appsec works, see this White Paper and the in-depth Video Tutorial. You can also experiment with deployment in the free Playground.