Akamai Recognized As A Leader In 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant For Web Application Firewalls For Third Consecutive Year

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences has been recognized by Gartner as a Leader in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls for the third year in a row. Gartner analysts evaluated multiple vendors based upon their ability to execute and completeness of vision.

Web applications and APIs are particularly vulnerable to attacks today. The enterprise attack surface has expanded, with web applications increasingly deployed in hybrid- and multi-cloud environments, supporting mobile engagement, and built on microservices - many exposed via APIs, which have become a significant emerging attack vector. The challenge for today’s digital organizations is protecting business-critical applications that are rapidly changing, increasingly opened up to partners, and exposed on the public internet to attacks that are more sophisticated and directly impact business outcomes.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls highlights the necessary criteria needed to evaluate web application firewalls and assessed them.

Akamai was evaluated for its two Web Application Firewall offerings, Kona Site Defender and Web Application Protector.

Those are part of a full portfolio of cloud security services provided by Akamai, including an API gateway, bot management (Bot Manager), application access control (Enterprise Application Access), a managed DDoS scrubbing service (Prolexic), and Domain Name System services (Fast DNS). With these products, Akamai demonstrates a commitment to developing and improving its web application security solutions with one of the largest research teams and visibility into more security threats - including 178B WAF rule triggers a day.

“Akamai is continually working to advance its products and services, aiming to protect all architecture — core, cloud, and edge — to thwart attackers and mitigate threats wherever they arise,” said Josh Shaul, Vice President of Web Security, Akamai. “Our web application firewall solutions provide customers with security controls that protect digital businesses against critical vulnerabilities and other threats while preserving the user experience of legitimate application users.”

According to Gartner, by 2023, “more than 30% of public-facing web applications and APIs will be protected by cloud web application and API protection (WAAP) services, which combine distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection, bot mitigation, API protection and WAFs. This is an increase from fewer than 10% today.”

“We’re delighted that Gartner has again recognized Akamai as a Leader in this category, which we believe validates our achievements in this area to date,” said Shaul. “The Akamai team plans to continue to work even harder on security solutions that demonstrate the value of the scale and intelligence that edge security offers.”

For additional information regarding Akamai’s WAF offerings, visit here.

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

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