Investments into Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) solutions in the Asia-Pacific region continued to increase during 2018, with both markets recording robust growth on a year-on-year (YoY) basis. An increase in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) DDoS and application layer attacks, as well as their growing sophistication, has been driving greater adoption of DDoS and WAF solutions. During 2018, DDoS and Web-based attacks continued to increase, both in terms of frequency and sophistication. With the increasing popularity and penetration of IoT devices and the high-speed mobile broadband, the number of DDoS attacks using compromised IoT devices was on the rise. At the same time, attacks on Web-based applications exploiting application vulnerability were significantly increasing. What evoked greater concern among stakeholders was the growing sophistication of DDoS and application attacks, driving investment into DDoS and WAF solutions during the year.

While the adoption of on-premise solutions recorded a slowdown for both WAF and DDoS markets across the APAC region, investment in cloud-based DDoS and WAF services continued to increase significantly. The slowdown in adoption of on-premise solutions reflects a shift of organizations away from appliance-based solutions that are difficult to scale up and out to deal with the increasingly sophisticated threat landscape when it comes to application layer security. This may also be attributable to the purchase and replacement life cycle of the products, as particularly relevant for service provider customers (telcos and managed service providers)–the largest adopters of on-premise DDoS solutions.

Increasing investment in cloud-based DDoS and WAF services indicated a growing interest among enterprises in always-on, scalable, and management-free security services. As more and more enterprises are migrating their applications to the cloud, cloud-based security services are increasingly emerging as the preferred option. As many cloud-based services providers are offering both WAF and DDoS mitigation services on the same platform and package, it is easier for enterprises to adopt these technologies to reduce the complexity in management of separate DDoS and WAF boxes.

Companies mentioned in the DDoS protection and WAF market competitive landscape include Imperva, DBAPPSecurity, Akamai, Penta Security Systems, Venustech, NSFOCUS, Alibaba Cloud, F5 Networks, Sangfor, Monitorapp, NETSCOUT Systems, Huawei, Radware, Nexusguard, Verisign, and other participants. Countries included in this study are Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, India, Japan, and South Korea.