Market Overview

Cloud-based Services to Enhance the Web Application Firewall Market

Until recently, WAF solutions had been limited to large enterprise customers, as the WAF products were expensive, required additional training and staffing; and time to deploy, tune, and update. However, the market is now expanding with the emergence of cloud-based WAF solutions, which is replacing the traditional on-premises appliances. These solutions simply require businesses to direct their web traffic to the security company's network, and manage the solution through a web portal. Cloud-based WAFs offer a cost effective alternative for smaller businesses that cannot afford a costly and long-term physical WAF appliance deployment.

Even though web security solutions are now being implemented across the world, the United States and Europe hold the majority market share. Rising instances of web attacks such as cyber theft, espionage, vandalism, fraud and harassment has resulted in web, network and information security are a constant concern. Consequently, enterprises are increasing security budgets and employing experts to handle security tools to thwart cyber criminals.

The security industry is growing with the introductions of emerging and cutting-edge products that also meet the customers' budget allocations. This has resulted in WAF integrating with other solutions such as advanced endpoint security, advanced malware sandboxing and distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation. However, the glut of options often overwhelms customers and slows down buying decisions and sales cycles. The technical sophistication and complexity of WAF is also a growing concern among consumers, as WAF needs to be tuned and updated in line with the evolution of applications.

Significantly, WAFs were prone to high false positives in the initial stages. In order to address this issue, WAF vendors have invested heavily in improving the threat detection capabilities of their products through threat detection algorithms, threat research, and device reputation capabilities. These tools have lowered false positive rates across all products, and WAFs can now be deployed reliably in full blocking model.