Frost Radar™: Greater China Web Application Firewall Solutions Market, 2021

The COVID 19 pandemic has triggered the acceleration of digital transformation. Organizations are rapidly expanding their digital capacity to survive and thrive in the fast-changing business environment. To cope with the disruptions brought by the pandemic, organizations today heavily rely on web and mobile applications to connect with customers, business partners, and employees. This results in a demand spike for both external-facing e-commerce online platforms and cloud-based productivity solutions for internal usage. As organizations become increasingly dependent on application resources, the increased usage of both web and mobile applications has led to an expanded attack surface with additional entry points for potential exploitation. To better secure the back-end infrastructure where applications are hosted, be it a local data center or public cloud environment, organizations will need to balance various business requirements between their application development team and security team. As the first defense line to protect web applications, websites, or web servers against application-layer attacks; web application firewall (WAF) solutions have experienced increasing demands. While most organizations in the region may continue to house their application development within their own data center or private cloud environment, there is an ongoing trend towards migrating application development and production processes to public cloud environments for better scalability, flexibility, and cost advantages. As such, the entire application back-end infrastructure will become more complex, and WAF vendors will need to make sure they can support customers’ migration journey to the cloud. In this Frost Radar™ study, Frost & Sullivan objectively assessed the top 10 dedicated Web Application Firewall (WAF) providers with at least 1.0% market share in Greater China from a field of more than 30 domestic and global industry players. The companies represented on the Frost Radar™ features both Chinese and international players with active business presence across all three markets in the region. The leading local providers chosen were Alibaba Cloud, DBAPPSecurity Co., Ltd., NSFOCUS Technologies Group Co., Ltd., Sangfor Technologies, Inc., Topsec Technologies Group, Inc. and Venustech Group, Inc., while international companies include Akamai Technologies, Inc., Cloudflare, Inc., F5 Networks, Inc. and Imperva, Inc. Author: Vivien Pua