Akamai Receives Highest Scores In Two Use Cases In Gartner's Critical Capabilities For Cloud Web Application Firewalls Services

Akamai Scores Highest in Web Scale Critical Business Applications and Mobile Applications Use Cases, Company Also Positioned as Leader in Magic Quadrant Companion Report

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Akamai Technologies, Inc.

Dec 18, 2018, 14:12 ET

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the intelligent edge platform for securing and delivering digital experiences, announced it received the highest scores in two of the three analyzed use cases in Gartner's 2018 Critical Capabilities for Cloud Web Application Firewalls Services report. Akamai ranked highest in the web scale critical business applications and mobile applications use cases.

As part of the Critical Capabilities report – a companion report to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls report in which Akamai was named a Leader for the second consecutive year – Gartner evaluated 9 cloud web application firewall (WAF) services companies for their ability to protect web applications and APIs.

In this report, products were evaluated across the following capabilities: API security, bot management, DDoS protection, technical architecture, management and monitoring, scalability and geographic presence, rule-based controls and signatures, positive security/anomaly detection, and downward scalability.

The report says that cloud WAF services are becoming the preferred choice to protect public facing web apps. According to the report, "By 2020, more than 50% of public-facing web applications will be protected by cloud-based WAF service platforms, combining CDN, DDoS protection, bot mitigation and WAF, up from less than 20% today."

"We believe that this latest recognition from Gartner reflects the architecture pattern of the future and that Akamai is very well positioned to continue enabling our customers to derive significant value from our platform based on our strategic focus on cloud-based solutions," said Josh Shaul, Vice President of Web Security, Akamai. "Our integrated solutions provide a true web application and API protection solution and we've been innovating those solutions with more powerful automation, analytics, granular controls, and expert services."

Security and risk management leaders should keep in mind that business-critical and mobile apps require more stringent security capabilities than simply bundling basic protections in a cloud WAF service. The report calls out that, Akamai demonstrated leadership in developing bot detection beyond reputation controls, and providing a comprehensive list of legitimate bots. Akamai Kona allows customers to register their JSON and XML API schema to enforce a positive security model, and offers one of the most flexible sets of rate-limiting controls for API. Akamai Kona uses a large base of threat intelligence and builds risk scores for application clients, leveraging its global visibility of internet traffic.

"As the industry evolves to focus more on data privacy, while enabling secure integrations with disparate platforms, Akamai is the only platform with the scale and intelligence to maintain the trust of the world's leading digital businesses, while making our sophisticated industry-leading technology available and simpler to consume for the broader market," said Craig Adams, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Security and Performance Business Units, Akamai.

This news comes among recent analyst recognition of Akamai's cloud security capabilities. Akamai was recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls¹. The company was also recognized in Forrester's most recent Wave/New Wave reports for Web Application Firewalls² and Bot Management³ and received the Frost & Sullivan Bot Risk Management Market Leadership Award, 2018. In addition, Akamai's Kona Site Defender was just named as a finalist in the 2019 SC Awards as the industry's "Best Web Application Solution".

A complimentary copy of the complete report, Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Cloud Web Application Firewalls Services, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Ayal Tirosh, Claudio Neiva, Adam Hils 6 December 2018, is available here. For additional information regarding Akamai's WAF offerings, visit here.

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About Akamai
Akamai secures and delivers digital experiences for the world's largest companies. Akamai's intelligent edge platform surrounds everything, from the enterprise to the cloud, so customers and their businesses can be fast, smart, and secure. Top brands globally rely on Akamai to help them realize competitive advantage through agile solutions that extend the power of their multi-cloud architectures. Akamai keeps decisions, apps and experiences closer to users than anyone — and attacks and threats far away. Akamai's portfolio of edge security, web and mobile performance, enterprise access and video delivery solutions is supported by unmatched customer service, analytics and 24/7/365 monitoring. To learn why the world's top brands trust Akamai, visit www.akamai.com, blogs.akamai.com, or @Akamai on Twitter.

¹Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Adam Hils, Ayal Tirosh, Claudio Neiva, 29 August 2018.
^²The Forrester Wave™: Web Application Firewalls, Q2 2018
^³The Forrester New Wave™: Bot Management, Q3 2018