Research and Markets has announced the addition of Frost & Sullivan's new report "Asia Pacific (including Japan) Web Application Firewall Market CY2010" to their offering.

This research service analyzes the Web application firewall (WAF) as a security technology, either hardware or software that sits before the Web server and analyzes layer 7 traffic (a whole session, not packets) to protect applications from attacks aimed at exploiting vulnerabilities found in the applications. The Web Application Firewall (WAF) market registered a robust growth of 28.4 percent growth on a year on year basis in 2010, reaching a total market size of $60.2 million in Asia Pacific.

Explosion of Web 2.0 Technologies Triggers Growth in the Asia Pacific Web Application Firewall Market

The Asia Pacific Web application firewall (WAF) market is expected to hit a strong compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.6 percent, reaching a total market size of $315.1 million in 2015. Relentless attacks targeting government, service provider, and banking sites encouraged a more proactive stance in combating the attacks and drove the gravitation toward WAF solutions.

The WAF market registered a robust growth of 28.4 percent on a YoY basis in 2010, reaching a total market size of $60.2 million in Asia Pacific. The rapid emergence of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise environment, coupled with the fast growing consumer community of mobile devices played a pivotal role in steering the growth of Web applications. Most of the markets in the region represent immense growth opportunities for WAFs as cyber attacks grow in sophistication and awareness levels among enterprises toward the technology improve, notes the analyst of this research service. Regulatory compliance is another factor helping to push WAF uptake.

The government vertical experienced a huge surge, emerging as the second-largest adopter in the 2010 Asia Pacific WAF market. As almost all the markets in the region were undergoing some form of e-government initiatives, WAF protection was viewed as being necessary to protect governmental assets on the Web. Moreover, the government sites are among those most commonly targeted by cyber criminals, regardless of how static or advanced the Web site is. As a result, the government vertical (including the defense sector) had become a key spender in the Asia Pacific WAF market for 2010. The major contributing countries include China and South Korea.

Lack of Awareness Restrains Market Momentum

Although the demand for WAF has gone beyond the hype phase in many ways in Asia Pacific, there is still prevailing market confusion surrounding the unique value proposition that WAF offers. Countries in Asia Pacific had only witnessed the adoption of WAF in limited verticals where enterprises were relatively more security-conscious. Moreover, the current status of incorporating Web technologies into business setup was still low in some of the Asia Pacific countries. WAF is now being perceived as a more potent solution.

With the Web rapidly emerging as a key channel to drive forward business processes, the security market is likely to witness the rise of WAF as a primary security platform on the Web front, similar to the role that the network-based firewall has been performing for corporate networks up until now.