Fastly > Case Studies > Securing Digital Evidence: Axon's Deployment of Fastly Next-Gen WAF

Securing Digital Evidence: Axon's Deployment of Fastly Next-Gen WAF

Technology Category

Cybersecurity & Privacy - Application Security
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms

Applicable Industries

National Security & Defense
Security & Public Safety

Applicable Functions

Maintenance
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Counterfeit Product Identification
Tamper Detection

About The Customer

Axon is a leading self-defense company that operates Evidence.com, a platform used by thousands of law enforcement agencies across the globe to manage their digital evidence. The platform handles a constant flow of digital evidence, including body cam video, dash cam footage, and other evidence data from the sources in the field. The platform connects technology and people in order to create safer communities. Axon's security and development teams have created a way for agencies to safely transfer this highly sensitive and personal digital evidence to the Evidence.com central management solution.

The Challenge

Axon, a leading self-defense company, operates Evidence.com, a platform that handles a constant flow of digital evidence from various law enforcement and public safety agencies across the globe. The platform is used to manage digital evidence in a secure, scalable, and efficient way, allowing agencies to focus on the use of the data rather than the burden of managing it. Given the highly sensitive and personal nature of this information, security is of paramount importance. However, traditional Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) were not compatible with Axon's modern architecture and couldn't be effectively deployed in production blocking mode. Axon's security team built their own detection rules and evaluated multiple WAF technologies, but were not satisfied with any of the legacy solutions available on the market. They found themselves spending too much of their operational resources maintaining their homegrown web application security solution, which didn’t provide robust blocking capabilities and was only as good as the rules written for it.

The Solution

Axon chose to work with Signal Sciences to implement their next-generation WAF solution. The goal was to help resolve the cumbersome security triaging that the Axon security team experienced and to free up their time to focus on actual attack events and more strategic security initiatives. Signal Sciences provided Axon with a solution that worked “out of the box,” improving visibility and securing their customers’ sensitive data more effectively without compromising operational and business needs. Axon replaced their homegrown WAF solution with the Signal Sciences next-gen WAF solution. The combination of Signal Sciences’ ease of install that both product and security teams could support, along with true security visibility into attack signals that didn’t require configuration or tuning, allowed Axon to achieve its goals of application protection without compromise.

Operational Impact

With the implementation of Signal Sciences’ next-gen WAF solution, Axon has been able to gain leverage from existing security resources and advance their application security posture. The security team is quickly informed of real-time web application attacks and blocking decisions, and uses this information to prioritize their security resources to focus on the most targeted parts of their applications. The continuous visibility they receive from the Signal Sciences’ platform helps Axon focus on more strategic decisions and initiatives without taxing their security team to sift through logs or maintain a set of detection rules. This has enabled Axon to further deliver on their mission to help keep communities safe by providing their law enforcement customers with the highest degree of data protection.