Akamai Receives Highest Scores in Two Use Cases in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Cloud Web Application Firewalls Services for Second Year in a Row

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences, announced it received the highest scores in the API security and web scale critical business applications use cases for the second year in a row, and ranked third out of 12 providers in the public-facing web application use case in Gartner’s 2019 Critical Capabilities for Cloud Web Application Firewalls Services report.

As part of the Critical Capabilities report – a companion report to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls report in which Akamai was named a Leader for the third consecutive year – Gartner evaluated 12 cloud web application firewall (WAF) services companies for their ability to protect web applications and APIs.

In this report, products were evaluated across the following capabilities: API security, bot management, DDoS protection, technical architecture, management and MSS, monitoring and reporting, scalability and geographic presence, rule-based controls and signatures, positive security/anomaly detection, programmability, and downward scalability.

The report says that “the portfolio approach of cloud-delivered WAF services has become the preferred choice to protect public facing web apps.” According to the report, “By 2023, more than 30% of public-facing web applications and APIs 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.” A key finding of the report says that, increasingly, Gartner observes that enterprises evaluate the four core capabilities that define a cloud web application and API protection (WAAP) service: WAF, DDoS protection, bot management and API protection.

“Akamai has been pursuing a cloud delivered security strategy that addresses critical capabilities in DDoS protection, application security, API protection, and bot management as an integrated edge platform that provides scalable and consistent protections across the multi-cloud infrastructure that 84%¹ of enterprises are pursuing today,” said Raja Patel, Vice President of Products, Web Security at Akamai. “We are pleased to see that the industry is moving toward a model where cloud delivered security solutions will be the prevailing architectural choice and feel that Akamai’s unique ability to deliver these integrated protections at the edge is a unique differentiator for us.”

This news comes among recent analyst recognition of Akamai’s intelligent edge security capabilities. Akamai was recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls² . The company was also recognized as a Leader by Forrester in its most recent “The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust eXtended Ecosystem Platform Providers report. In addition, Akamai’s Kona Site Defender was named the winner in the 2019 SC Awards as the industry’s “Best Web Application Solution”.

A complimentary copy of the complete report, Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Cloud Web Application Firewalls Services, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Adam Hils, Rajpreet Kaur, John Watts 19 October 2019, For additional information regarding Akamai’s WAF offerings, visit here.

¹ RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report From Flexera.

² Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Adam Hils, Claudio Neiva, Rajpreet Kaur, 17 September 2019.

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