Recently, IDC released the report "2024 China WAAP Vendor Technology Capability Assessment." WebRAY has been successfully included in the report due to its outstanding technical capabilities, achieving a full score in multiple key dimensions, including WAF, API protection and monitoring, and industry applications. This recognition further confirms WebRAY's leading position and market influence in the field of innovative technology.

With the rapid development of cloud-native, microservices architecture, and the Internet of Things (IoT), the deployment and management of web services are undergoing profound changes. The surge in the number of app applications, mini-programs, and API endpoints has dramatically expanded the web exposure surface, making traditional WAFs increasingly inadequate in addressing the growing complexity of network attack challenges. In this context, WAAP (Web Application and API Protection) technology has emerged as a powerful tool for enterprises to protect the security of web applications and APIs.

IDC believes that WAAP is a security solution centered around WAF that aggregates API security, bot management, DDoS protection, and other technologies.

Core Functions of WAAP

WAAP, as an integrated solution encompassing various security technologies, aims to provide comprehensive protection for web applications and APIs. It typically includes the following features:

• Web Application Firewall (WAF): Protects web applications by identifying and blocking attacks such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and file inclusion.
• API Security: Protects APIs from abuse and malicious attacks, providing fine-grained access control, traffic monitoring, and sensitive data protection.
• Bot Management: Detects and blocks threats posed by malicious bots (such as web crawlers and automated attack tools) to ensure legitimate traffic is not disrupted.
• DDoS Protection: Prevents distributed denial-of-service attacks, ensuring the stability of web applications and APIs under large-scale traffic assaults.

Differences Between WAAP and Traditional WAF

WAAP, as an upgraded version of WAF, not only provides traditional web application firewall protection but also enhances API protection and advanced threat management capabilities:

• Broader Coverage: WAAP extends protection to APIs, microservices architectures, and modern web applications, going beyond the limitations of traditional WAFs that only safeguard the web layer.
• Automation and Intelligence: By integrating AI and big data technologies, WAAP boasts stronger automated threat identification and response capabilities, enabling real-time adjustments to protection strategies and reducing human intervention.
• Adaptability to Modern Application Architectures: With the popularity of microservices, containerization, and serverless architectures, WAAP can more flexibly address the security needs of these complex structures.

Importance of API Protection

With the explosive growth of API traffic, APIs have become a pillar of core business for enterprises, making the protection of APIs from attacks a key component of WAAP. Key measures include:

• Authentication and Authorization: Ensuring the legitimacy of API calls through standard authentication mechanisms such as OAuth and JWT.
• Traffic Monitoring and Rate Limiting: Real-time monitoring of API traffic, identifying abnormal access patterns, and taking throttling or blocking measures to prevent abuse or malicious attacks.
• Sensitive Data Protection: Encrypting and de-sensitizing sensitive data in transit to ensure data security.

WebRAY's WAAP Solution

WebRAY's WAAP overall solution deeply integrates WAF with API security technologies, constructing a comprehensive and multi-layered protection system that not only effectively defends against external network attacks but also finely manages internal API access permissions and data flow, ensuring the security and compliance of web applications and APIs.

• Intelligent Threat Identification and Response：WebRAY's WAAP utilizes advanced AI technology to achieve intelligent threat identification and response. The system can analyze and predict attack patterns in real time, automatically adjusting protection strategies to reduce manual intervention and enhance response speed, ensuring enterprises can swiftly address emerging threats.
• Customized Security Policies and Compliance Management：Based on specific enterprise needs, WebRAY provides flexible security policy customization functions to ensure security policies perfectly align with business objectives. At the same time, it simplifies compliance management processes, helping enterprises easily address industry standards and personalized security needs.
• Data Security and Privacy Protection：The solution places a high priority on the protection of sensitive data, employing encryption technologies and strict access controls to prevent data leaks and misuse, ensuring the security of core enterprise assets. It also strictly adheres to data security and privacy regulations, providing robust compliance assurances for enterprises.

Seamless Protection Across Platforms and Environments

Whether in on-premises data centers, cloud environments, or hybrid clouds, WebRAY's WAAP solution provides unified security protection and management, ensuring comprehensive security coverage even under complex application architectures.

WebRAY's WAF products have maintained a position in the top five of the Chinese market share for five consecutive years and have been recognized by IDC as a representative vendor in the API field within the data security technology development roadmap. This inclusion in the WAAP report once again underscores WebRAY's leading advantage and outstanding market performance in the field of application security protection.

IDC predicts that in terms of market scale, WAAP will gradually replace WAF and become the mainstream product in the web application security market, while also encompassing API security and other markets. WebRAY will continue to respond to market demands and the development of cutting-edge technologies, advancing product technology research and development in the WAAP field, continually enhancing the intelligent level of its products and their capabilities to address complex network attacks and risks, empowering users across various industries to navigate digital transformation without fear of security risks and move forward steadily.