According to Frost & Sullivan, Asia-Pacific web application firewall (WAF) market is expected to grow from $115.6 million in 2013 to $666.2 million in 2020. Increasing reliance on web applications coupled with organisations? vulnerability to persistent cyber-attacks are the key factors contributing to higher demand for WAF in the Asia-Pacific region.
Further, the research firm underlines that stringent regulations regarding data security continue to drive WAF adoption in the region. With the enforcement of payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) in several countries, solutions such as WAF are considered essential for compliance. Frost & Sullivan estimates WAF market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 28.4 per cent between 2013 and 2020. Meanwhile, it expects the overall market growth rate to peak in the next two years as the proliferation of devices connected through various channels puts organisations at greater risk for cyber attacks.
The research firm points out that despite growing demand for WAF, complexities in terms of WAF management may hold back some enterprises from investing in these solutions. However, this in turn would create opportunities for managed security service providers to provide WAF-as-a-service, impacting the share of traditional WAF vendors. In fact, to keep pace with managed security service providers, vendors will have to design multi-faceted WAF solutions with capabilities extended to database security, distributed denial-of-service protection, anti-scrapping, and authentication. This integrated approach will lead to comprehensive, yet simple-to-manage, multi-layered security that can widen the consumer base in the Asia-Pacific WAF market.
Frost & Sullivan concludes that going forward intensive competition in highly fragmented WAF market will drive the growth for more affordable and flexible products particularly for small and medium businesses.
