Websites and web applications are increasing in complexity and risk, with new vulnerabilities discovered daily. This evolving threat landscape makes it increasingly difficult to protect your customers, web applications, APIs, and data centers. On-premises web application firewalls (WAFs) don’t provide the scale or flexibility needed to thwart today’s threats.

Increased demand for cloud-based WAFs is driving the overall market, according to Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls. In the report, Gartner notes that “by 2023, more than 30% of public- facing web applications will be protected by cloud web application and API protection (WAAP) services that combine distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, bot mitigation, API protection and WAFs. This is an increase from fewer than 10% today.” This increase is reflective of a movement away from stand-alone WAFs; “By 2020, stand-alone web application firewall (WAF) hardware appliances will represent fewer than 20% of new WAF deployments, which is a decrease from today’s 35%.”

In this report, Gartner analysts evaluated 14 vendors based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision. Enterprise security teams can use this report to research how WAFs can provide improved security that is easy to consume and manage, and addresses data privacy requirements.

We’re happy to report that Akamai was positioned as a Leader for the second year in a row.