Forrester names Akamai as web application firewall leader

Akamai Technologies has announced it was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Web Application Firewalls, Quarter 3 2022 report. 

In its examination, Forrester evaluated 12 total vendors in the WAF space based on 24 criteria grouped by current offering, strategy and market presence.

The report notes that web application attacks remain one of the top attack vectors for enterprises that have been breached due to external attacks. This was recently confirmed by an Akamai Web Application and API Threat Report that showed web application attack attempts against customers grew by more than 300% year over year in the first quarter of 2022. In addition, Forrester states that customers are increasingly looking to protect a wider range of applications across a wider spectrum of deployment environments.

In the report, Forrester writes that Akamai stands out in detection, with machine learning that looks at a range of application-based attacks, anti-evasion features, and a threat research team that numbers in the hundreds. In addition, the report states, reference customers had high praise for Akamais detection capabilities and the App & API Protector dashboards, noting how well dashboards support us in the detection and analysis of an attack.

Akamai's App & API Protector is designed to protect entire web and API estates with a holistic set of powerful protections purposely built with customer-focused automation and simplicity. Powered by a new adaptive security engine, App & API Protector brings together many industry-leading core technologies in web application firewall, bot mitigation, API security and DDoS protection under a single solution that is easy to use.

"To be recognised as a leader by Forrester is, in our opinion, validation of our App & API Protector, which detects the largest, most sophisticated attacks and thwarts them every day," says Eric Graham, Vice President of Product Management at Akamai. 

"We continually monitor and improve our capabilities to defend customers from new threats, while enabling customers to protect their rapidly evolving attack surfaces," he says.

Earlier this year, Forrester named Akamai a leader in its 2022 Bot Management Wave report, acknowledging the company's standout vision.

"Akamai's vision is a standout, recognising the evolution of bot operations, addressing the growing collaboration between security and the lines of business, and protecting the end-customer journey; recent launches of adjacent offerings like Account Protector and Audience Hijacking Protection support the vision," the report stated at the time.

Akamai said its bot management solutions allow for behavioural-based detections with advanced machine learning algorithms powered by data on the intelligent edge platform.

The company interacts with 1.3 billion unique devices every day and is able to recognise anomalies in hundreds of signals to identify bots.

The announcement of its Forrester recognition came after Akamai secured an agreement to acquire Infrastructure as a Service platform Linode in February.