Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – September 30, 2015 – The Asia-Pacific (APAC) Web application firewall (WAF) market is seeing strong growth momentum, largely due to the increasing reliance on Web applications to cater to eCommerce and Internet banking activities. The popularity of these industries in recent years has boosted the number of users as well as attack frequency, driving the adoption of WAF solutions to protect business and customer information.
New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, Asia-Pacific Web Application Firewall Market (http://www.frost.com/p863), finds that the market earned revenues of US$155.9 million in 2014 and estimates this to reach US$769.6 million in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate of 25.6 percent. The study covers stand-alone appliances and add-on modules/software.
“As the threat landscape is becoming sophisticated and attacks on application layers are increasing significantly, Web systems are more vulnerable than ever and frequently targeted by hackers to gain access to privileged information,” notedFrost & Sullivan Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) Industry Analyst Vu Anh Tien. “This has prompted APAC enterprises to use dedicated WAF technology to protect their Web application servers as legacy network security solutions fail to do so.”
Moreover, regulatory compliance is a key motivation for enterprises in the region to invest in WAF technology as several international payment industry standards and local personal data protection acts have been implemented across countries recently.
However, the complexity of WAF technology may cause many enterprises to shift to other legacy technologies such as firewall, intrusion detection system/intrusion prevention system or unified threat management. Further, the additional costs for professional and maintenance services as well the shortage of manpower with the right skill-sets could discourage enterprises from using WAF solutions. On the other hand, WAF technology is also undergoing a significant revolution to become smarter, more advanced and comprehensive to suit the changing threat landscape.
“During the course of our research, we observed a shift in the security paradigm, wherein WAF solutions are no longer required for just threat prevention but also detection and remediation,” said Frost & Sullivan ICT Senior Industry Analyst Charles Lim. “Along with providing protection against sophisticated SQL or cross site scripting, WAF solutions need to be able to monitor web pages regularly for any case of defacement as well as provide instant restoration.”
WAF solutions will eventually be able to perform post-breach remediation. While the deep integration of application vulnerability scanners and patching technologies alone is critical to achieve this, some WAF vendors will incorporate Web defacement detection and monitoring features into their solutions.
Asia-Pacific Web Application Firewall Market is part of the Network Security (https://www.frost.com/research/industry/information-communications-technologies/cloud-network-it-services/) Growth Partnership Service program. Frost & Sullivan’s related studies include: APAC Managed Security Services Market, APAC Distributed Denial of Services (DDoS) Protection Market, APAC Network Security Market, and APAC Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) Solution Market. All studies included in subscriptions provide detailed market opportunities and industry trends evaluated following extensive interviews with market participants.
