Frost Radar™: Greater China Web Application Firewall Solutions Market, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a surge in online business and rapid adoption of digital technologies, triggering an explosion in business applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) that drive connected experiences. IT infrastructure is now more complex. Customers deploy wide-ranging applications across diverse environments and architectures, including private and public clouds, data centers, edge devices, containers, microservices, and serverless computing. However, the evolving threat landscape and agile development processes have made legacy web application firewall (WAF) solutions unable to scale and meet fast-changing security requirements. Now, a modern application security strategy is critical to protect against application-layer attacks, including account take over, botnets, API abuse, distributed denial of service (DDoS), and the OWASP Top 10 attacks. Integrating application security into the DevOps process to embrace a SecDevOps or DevSecOps framework and meet today’s modern applications and deployments is imperative. Today’s WAF solutions must deploy quickly across any environment, enabling organizations to secure all applications regardless of their hosting environments and architectures. Flexible deployment (cloud, on premises, or at the edge) and operational choices (fully managed, self-service, or SaaS-delivered) are a must to best suit individual use cases, depending on each organization’s infrastructure. From a field of more than 30 domestic and global industry players, Frost & Sullivan assessed the top 10 dedicated WAF providers with at least 1% market share in Greater China. These 10 leaders are both Chinese and international players with an active business presence across China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan: Akamai Technologies, Alibaba Cloud, Cloudflare, F5, Imperva, NSFOCUS, Sangfor Technologies, Topsec, Venustech, and Wangsu-CDNetworks. Author: Vivien Pua