When Gartner released the Gartner 2018 Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls, Akamai was positioned as a leader for the second year in a row.
In the research, Gartner noted a change reporting; “by 2023, more than 30% of public-facing web applications will be protected by cloud web application and API protection services that combine DDoS protection, bot mitigation, API protection, and WAFs. This is an increase from fewer than 10% today.” 1
The movement away from stand-alone WAFs is growing stronger and will continue to expand at a steady rate. Gartner reported that “By 2020, stand-alone WAF hardware appliances will represent fewer than 20% of new WAF deployments, which is a decrease from today’s 35%.”
In the report, Gartner analysts evaluated 14 vendors based on two critical areas: the ability to execute and completeness of vision. Leaders are defined as those who execute well against their current vision and are well-positioned for tomorrow.
In our Summer 2018 State of the Internet/Security report, we announced that Akamai defended more than 400 million web application attacks over a six-month period – a 38% increase over the prior period.
Cloud-based WAFs protect public and internal web applications and APIs with improved security that’s easy to consume and manage.
The Best WAFs Provide:
• Accuracy: Stop more web attacks while minimizing false positives
• Visibility: Remove the guesswork from identifying and responding to attacks
• Adaptability: Update protections as needed
• Scale: Adequately handle traffic
• Ease: Minimize the effort to manage and deploy
According to Gartner, WAFs should also provide signature-based protection, and support positive security models and/or anomaly detection.
“In the long term, cloud WAF services, which were built from the beginning to be multitenant and cloud-centric, avoid costly maintenance of legacy code. They also provide a competitive advantage, with faster release cycles and rapid implementation of innovative features,” Gartner wrote.
Organizations are now looking for cloud-based WAFs delivered in a subscription model that offers multiple bundled features, including DDoS protection, bot management and a content delivery network (CDN).
Akamai offers all of this, providing a highly scalable WAF that defends against emerging threats to web security while keeping application performance high.
Right now, you can make a change that keeps your websites, applications, APIs, and users safe with the world’s only intelligent edge security platform. Learn more by visiting www.akamai.com or blogs.akamai.com, and following @Akamai on Twitter.
