2021 has seen a lot of change. Billionaires now go where only governments and Red Bull gimmicks could go before. The 2020 Olympics didn’t take place in 2020. Tom Brady won his 7th Super Bowl for a completely new franchise [those of you in the US get this reference]. Similar change in application security has now been defined by an annual report with a new name.
Gartner® published the 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for Web Application and API Protection and, despite the new name and expanded scope, Imperva has been named a Leader and rated highest for Completeness of Vision consistently throughout.
Imperva’s vision is to protect all applications for hybrid enterprises
If you picture an application 8 years ago, what you see is not complex: a very large piece of software running on vSphere in a leased data center. APIs were an innovative tool for tiny start-ups [I remember talking to my development team about the advantages of SOAP and why it was too soon to go to REST]. Amazon Web Services was just starting to offer a certification program for engineers. Clearly, 8 years is a very long time in application development time.
And yet, while so much has changed in 8 years, many web applications today are still versions of what was built then. It takes a great deal of methodical planning to properly migrate to cloud-native technologies, such as serverless functions, and gradual investments to effectively architect applications with RESTful and GraphQL APIs. For years, Imperva has continually focused on providing security for organizations in this transition, and the vast majority of them have a mix of legacy and modern across a hybrid environment. This is a key reason why we continue to invest in Web Application and API Protection that our customers can deploy in a variety of ways, from appliances in data centers to SaaS to natively deployed in AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
But you cannot protect all of a modern organization simply by adapting the protection they already use — it takes innovative approaches to secure what now comprises the majority of all traffic: APIs. Imperva protected our customers’ APIs prior to 2021, but this year, it became a top priority. A few months ago, we added the ability for customers to discover the APIs receiving traffic outside the view of the security team. And to ensure our customers can continue their modernization, we acquired CloudVector for advanced API security protecting high-scale businesses, but more importantly, for the expertise in the team. Effectively protecting APIs requires a deep understanding of how development operations work and how much it differs from the application development of 8 years ago.
If you want to learn more about Imperva’s approach, please view the recorded session with Lebin Cheng, Head of API Security, and Peter Klimek, Office of CTO, here.
Imperva recognizes the industry needs beyond 2022
To handle all of this change, we believe we have the industry’s best approach to protecting our customers from innovative attacks, and thank Gartner for this report’s recognition. Not every application security vendor has our track record of rapidly integrating the technology of their acquisitions, most recently with how the advanced bot management capabilities from Distil Networks were available to Imperva customers in under a year. We look forward to the 2022 report, once Gartner and the broader market have seen what we will accomplish with the CloudVector team guiding the way.
To download the report, visit here.
To immediately start a free trial of our market-leading Cloud WAAP platform, visit our free trial site.
Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Web Application and API Protection”; Jeremy D’Hoinne, Rajpreet Kaur, John Watts, Adam Hils, Shilpi Handa; September 20, 2021.
The report was earlier named as Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls until 2020. Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Imperva.
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