Radware Named a Leader in WAF Market in New Industry Report

Radware was recently named a Leader in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) market by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions in their new industry report The SPARK Matrix: Web Application Firewall (WAF), Q4 2023, and the #1 overall vendor in terms of Technology Excellence.

This achievement marks the 3rd consecutive time that Radware has been named a leader in the WAF market by this report.

In the analyst’s own words: “Owing to the robust functional capability of its WAF solution, compelling customer references, comprehensive roadmap, and vision, Radware has been positioned among the technology leaders in the 2023 SPARK Matrix of the Web Application Firewall market.”

Achieving a Leader position in such report is an achievement on its own, but consistently repeating this achievement in multiple consecutive reports demonstrates the persistent excellence and ongoing enhancement of Radware’s web application security solutions.

In this blog post we will examine some of the reasons Radware was named a Leader for WAF in this report, and how our capabilities help us stand out in the market:

Security Excellence

The first and foremost requirement of a web application firewall is that it provides the highest quality protection against web application threats.

This is an area where Radware excels, and one of the primary reasons for our Technology Excellence #1 rank.

Radware employs a positive security approach for web application protection. Unlike the traditional ‘negative’ security approach, Radware adopted a ‘positive’ security model which provides higher degrees of protection with lower false positives.

The ‘negative’ security model, based on fixed rules of known malicious patterns, is the dominant approach in the market. It is based on static, pre-configured signatures to identify known malicious web application attack patterns. While it is simpler for the vendor to configure, it stops only known ‘bad’ traffic while letting all other connections go through. This means that it will not stop zero-day attacks which do not have a known pattern/signature, or attacks which are known, but are not ‘turned on’ in security policies.

In contrast, the ‘positive’ security model takes the opposite approach by focusing on legitimate traffic requests and blocking all traffic. Radware’s positive security approach is based on multiple layers of machine-learning (ML) and AI-based algorithms which ‘learn’ legitimate traffic patterns, establish a baseline of legitimate user behavior, and then automatically generates security policies which allow only legitimate traffic to go through, while blocking malicious requests which fall outside the parameters of allowed user behavior. The result is a higher level of protection, with lower false positives.

In the words of the report: “Radware differentiates itself from other vendors through its positive security model with auto policy generation, which uses advanced behavior analysis technologies to learn legitimate user behavior and block all activities, not conforming to legitimate behavior patterns. Also, based on Machine-learning algorithms, Radware’s WAF automatically creates and deploys security policies adapted to the application’s behavior. Radware uses a positive security model in addition to a negative security model, which identifies zero-day attacks along with OWASP Top 10 coverage.”

Comprehensive Coverage

Another requirement of modern WAF solutions is that they provide comprehensive coverage across all potential web application threat vectors. This often includes protection against API attacks, bad bots, L7 (Layer 7) web DDoS attacks, and client-side protection, as well.

This is another area where Radware excels at, with a holistic, centralized, and unified application protection through our Cloud Application Protection solution.

Radware’s Cloud Application Protection offers multiple security modules, covering all the potential threat surfaces of modern web applications. This includes:

As the report recognizes:

“Radware’s WAF provides built-in, fully automated API discovery and protection capabilities, which can automatically detect API endpoints, map out their structure, and automatically generate and apply the optimal security policy for them. […] Radware offers a new DDoS protection engine to web applications against complex L7 DDoS attacks to ensure the availability of web applications. […] Radware offers client-side protection using client-side logic that extends protection against supply-chain attacks via third-party APIs to offer protection against attacks that do not go through the server and are thus not detected by traditional WAFs.”

Robust Strategy & Vision

Finally, when it comes to such a dynamic and rapidly changing threat landscape such as that of web application security, it is important for security providers to keep their hands on the pulse of the market and stay one step ahead of attackers. This is why a robust product strategy is so important.

Here, too, Radware is recognized as a Leader in the market, with a market vision and technology roadmap to keep ahead of emerging threats and market trends.

In the words of the analyst:

“For its technology roadmap, Radware is working to improve its protection capabilities against generative sophisticated AI attacks using AI and ML to enhance its detection capabilities and increase automation protection. Radware is also developing new algorithms to maintain persistent and continuous identification across devices for threats with increased API usage. […] Radware has launched a new innovation center to focus on cloud-related research, threat research, and architecture, to further increase Radware’s commitment to enhance its cloud-related WAAP services.”

Click here to read the detailed Radware Knowledge Brief from The SPARK Matrix: Web Application Firewall, Q4 2023, by Quadrant Knowledge Solutions.