Business & Technology

Fortinet Maintains Position as a Challenger in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls

By Brian Schwarz | October 21, 2020

Fortinet has announced that it has maintained its position as a Challenger in Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls.

Organizations continue to rely on internet-facing web applications and APIs to achieve their digital innovation goals, and as a result, web application and API protection continues to grow in importance for businesses worldwide. Web applications support a wide range of critical line-of-business functions, including ecommerce, payroll, inventory management, learning management systems, and more. 

FortiWeb, Fortinet’s Web Application Firewall solution, was created to protect these business-critical web applications and APIs from cyber attacks targeting both known and unknown vulnerabilities, while also ensuring business continuity and productivity. FortiWeb leverages advanced machine learning (ML) techniques to customize protection of each application, saving organizations staff hours by cutting out the need for the time-consuming manual tuning required by other solutions. FortiWeb ML identifies anomalous behavior and determines whether it is malicious or benign, enabling security staff to rapidly address malicious activity. 

Customers can select the FortiWeb option that best fits their use case given its flexible deployment options. This includes hardware appliances, virtual machines, and containers that can be deployed in the data center, cloud environments, or the cloud native Security-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution FortiWeb Cloud, our WAF as a Service offering.

As customers increasingly deploy applications in multiple environments that include both private data centers and public clouds and continue to push application changes at an ever increasing pace, they face the challenge of implementing consistent application security across these diverse environments. To help those teams keep pace, our WAF-as-a-Service offering, FortiWeb Cloud, leverages public cloud infrastructure to deliver the same application and API protection as our physical and virtual appliances, but without the requirement to maintain and manage infrastructure. In fact, Fortinet uses this very service to protect our own website as well as for protecting critical departmental line-of-business web applications

Fortinet continues to invest in the innovative WAF capabilities that our customers require as they continue their digital transformation journeys, including these key enhancements from 2020: 

  • Deep learning capabilities that continuously model users’ behaviors to detect anomalies and block threats without creating the false positives that drive administrative overhead
  • Expanded options for deploying FortiWeb Cloud on AWSAzure and Google Cloud

As a result of this continued innovation, Fortinet delivers FortiWeb customers with advanced threat protection for web applications while ensuring business continuity and productivity. Read the full Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls report to learn more about our placement in the Challengers quadrant.

Learn how Fortinet’s Dynamic Cloud Security solutions provide increased visibility and control across cloud infrastructures, enabling secure applications and connectivity from data center to cloud. 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls, 19 October 2020, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Adam Hils, Rajpreet Kaur, John Watts

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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 Fortinet.