Every year, analyst firms publish reports that help organizations understand where security markets are heading. One of the more comprehensive ones is the QKS SPARK Matrix. In the 2026 DDoS Mitigation report, Radware is recognized as a SPARK Leader.
Radware is a leader because it stays close to customers and to the market, and keeps evolving with what the world demands. One clear example of that is a theme running through this year's report, one that Radware has consistently made a priority:
Security teams are looking for fewer manual decisions during an attack.
For years, the conversation around DDoS protection focused on one question: how big of an attack can you stop? That question still matters. But after reading the report, it became clear that buyers are asking something different today: how much of the response still depends on people?
Modern attacks don't wait for someone to investigate an alert, review logs, update a policy, or manually activate mitigation. Many attacks last only minutes. Others constantly change their behavior, making static rules ineffective. Every manual step adds delay.
QKS captures this shift clearly:
"AI and machine learning have transitioned from differentiators to core platform requirements."
The report explains that organizations now expect DDoS protection platforms to detect attacks, generate signatures, and begin mitigation within seconds, without waiting for human intervention. Automation is no longer a nice-to-have. It's becoming the baseline.
Another sentence stood out even more:
"The operational burden of DDoS defense is influencing platform selection as significantly as technical capability."
Think about what that means. Not long ago, security teams compared mitigation capacity, throughput, and the number of attacks a platform could stop. Those factors still matter. But today, buyers are also asking a different question: how much work will this platform save my team during a real attack?
Security teams are under constant pressure. Attack volumes continue to grow, while experienced security professionals remain difficult to hire. The result is that reducing operational effort has become almost as important as increasing protection.
The same theme appears in Radware's profile. QKS highlights the company's AI-powered behavioral detection, which enables security teams to identify and mitigate new attack campaigns without waiting for signature updates or manual intervention, helping reduce operational workload during an attack.
A recent example from Radware's customer community shows what this looks like in practice. A regional government in Europe was hit by a large-scale HTTPS flood, over 2 million requests per second for 30 straight minutes, nearly 20,000 times its normal traffic. Because HTTPS flood traffic often looks almost identical to real users, this isn't the kind of attack a team can review and respond to manually. AI-powered traffic baselining and automatically generated mitigation signatures blocked the malicious traffic while legitimate users kept working, without anyone needing to step in. You can read the full story here.
To me, that's the biggest takeaway from this year's report. The DDoS conversation is no longer only about who can stop the biggest attack. It's increasingly about who can help security teams make fewer manual decisions when every second counts.
Because during an attack, the best decision is often the one your security platform has already made for you.
Read the full 2026 QKS SPARK Matrix DDoS Mitigation report here.