ARTICLE
Web App and API Protection (WAAP) Buying Guide
End-to-End Protection for Apps, APIs, and Infrastructure
Related Content
Learn how effective and easy-to-operate Web App and API protection can preserve business agility and customer experience to shift the perspective of security from a cost center to a digital differentiator.
INTRODUCTION
Decentralized computing architectures based on clouds, containers, and APIs are fueling a new generation of digital innovation. However, these dynamic, distributed environments also expand the threat surface and increase opportunities for compromise, downtime, and business logic abuse. Learn how effective security solutions protect legacy and modern apps from threats while reducing operational complexity without slowing down your business.
How Did We Get to Web App and API Protection (WAAP)?
The web application security market has evolved to keep pace with the new digital economy. While the web application firewall (WAF) has proven to be an effective tool for mitigating application vulnerabilities, a proliferation of APIs and advancements in attacker sophistication has sparked a convergence of WAF, API security, bot management, and DDoS mitigation into WAAP solutions to protect apps and customer accounts from compromise, downtime, and account takeover.
A highly competitive digital landscape has led organizations to embrace modern software development to get ahead in the market, resulting in rapid release cycles to introduce new features and a mashup of integrations, front-end user interfaces, and back-end APIs. While it is not a weakness or defect to have a shopping cart or loyalty program, the endpoints that facilitate commerce and customer engagement are a prime target for attackers, requiring that all user interaction and business logic be protected from software vulnerabilities as well as inherent vulnerabilities that exploit logon, create account, and add to cart functions.
APIs, like traditional web apps, are subject to numerous other risks including weak authentication/authorization controls, misconfiguration, and server-side request forgery (SSRF). Even businesses with good API security practices may still be at risk. Third-party integrations that span environments and their corresponding security postures may expose otherwise secure businesses to API-based vulnerabilities. Rogue API endpoints, often referred to as shadow and zombie APIs, create a need for continuous monitoring and automated protection via machine learning.
Today, customers have unprecedented choice and low tolerance for bad experiences. Any security incident or friction when transacting, including performance delays and excessive authentication challenges, may result in revenue loss and even brand abandonment.
The new digital economy thus requires a new era in application security to safely unleash innovation, effectively manage risk, and reduce operational complexity.
Why the Pressing Need for WAAP?
Innovation and widespread adoption of cloud has led to an array of architectures and interdependencies between application components. Traditional three-tier web stacks and legacy apps are being retrofitted or even replaced with modern apps that leverage decentralized architecture such as containers and microservices to facilitate API-to-API communication. Cloud-native toolkits and business continuity have driven the adoption of multiple clouds. Easily accessible mobile apps and API integrations that speed time to market are key to maintaining competitive advantage in a market defined by continuous digital innovation.
Architectural decentralization, agile software development, and third-party integrations have increased the threat surface and introduced unknown risks, necessitating renewed focus on Shift Left principles such as threat modeling and ensuring that security and access control policy can be deployed and maintained consistently across architectures. In addition to mitigating exploits and misconfiguration, InfoSec must now protect their CI/CD pipelines, secure open source components, and defend their apps from automated attacks that abuse business logic.
API proliferation and tool sprawl is so pervasive that we are reaching an inflection point. Security teams will need to embrace telemetry to glean actionable insights and employ artificial intelligence to automatically tune security countermeasures to adequately mitigate risk.
Customer and Revenue Growth
Organizations that consistently deliver secure digital experiences will achieve customer and revenue growth.
Competitive Advantage
Cybersecurity incidents and customer friction are the biggest risks to digital success and competitive advantage.
Expanded Threat Surface
Architectural sprawl and interdependencies have dramatically expanded the threat surface for sophisticated attackers.
What Makes for Good WAAP?
Due to the complexity of securing web apps and APIs from a constant onslaught of exploits and abuse, cloud-delivered as-a-Service WAAP platforms are growing in popularity. These platforms have emerged from a variety of vendors, including CDN incumbents, application delivery pioneers, and security vendors that have expanded into adjacent markets through acquisition.
Effectiveness and ease-of-use are often cited as key buying criteria for WAAP but are subjective and difficult to verify during vendor selection.
A more practical approach is to define and group WAAP value propositions into table stakes, short list capabilities, and differentiators to help organizations make the most informed choice.
| Table Stakes | Short List Capabilities | Differentiators |
|---|---|---|
| Easy onboarding and low maintenance monitoring |
Positive security model with automated learning
|
Visibility and consistent security across apps and APIs |
Comprehensive security analytics
|
Behavioral analysis and anomaly detection | Maximum detection rate (efficacy) |
| Sophistication beyond signatures, rule, reputation |
Evasion countermeasures
|
Minimal false positive rate |
| API discovery and policy enforcement |
False positive remediation |
Transparent protection that reduces CX friction
|
| Scalable bot and DDoS protection |
Integration with security ecosystems and DevOps tools |
Easy to use, operate, and integrate
|
| Protection of underlying cloud-native infrastructure | Comprehensive observability, policy-based decryption, and full stack application insights |
Closed-loop vulnerability detection and auto remediation
|
| Sustainable and agile platform | Integrated web acceleration |
CDN and edge compute acceleration
|
What Makes the Best WAAP?
Best-in-class WAAP helps organizations improve their security posture at the speed of business, mitigate compromise without friction or excessive false positives, and reduce operational complexity to deliver secure digital experiences at scale—wherever apps and APIs need to be.
Comprehensive protection and consistent security
- Universal observability across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
- Consistent policy enforcement from core to cloud to edge
- Early detection and automatic remediation of indicators of vulnerability
Improve security posture at the speed of business
- CI/CD pipeline integration
- Dynamic API discovery and enforcement
- Automated protection and adaptive security
Mitigate compromise with minimal friction and false positives
- Real-time mitigation and retrospective analysis
- Accurate detection without strict security challenges
- Resilience during attacker retooling, escalation, evasion
Reduce operational complexity
- Mitigate risk of “shadow IT” and third-party integrations
- Streamline security across data center, clouds, and microservices
- Remove CDN, cloud, and architectural constraints to deploy security on-demand where needed
Improve digital performance
- High performance mesh backbone
- Flexible regional and customer edge sites
- Hybrid and multi-cloud network abstraction
The best WAAP delivers effective and easy-to-operate security on a distributed platform.
| Effective Security | Distributed Platform | Easy to Operate |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time mitigation |
Visibility across clouds and architectures
|
Self-service deployment |
Retrospective analysis |
Intrinsic security for all apps and APIs
|
Self-tuning security
|
| Low friction |
Consistent policy enforcement
|
Comprehensive dashboards |
| Low false positives |
Seamless remediation of emerging threats
|
Drill-down contextual insights
|
The F5 WAAP Advantage
F5 WAAP adapts as apps and attackers evolve to secure customer experiences in the new digital economy. |
Real-Time Mitigation
Robust security, threat intelligence, and anomaly detection protects all apps and APIs from exploits, bots, and abuse to prevent compromise, ATO, and fraud in real-time. |
Retrospective Analysis
Correlated insights across multiple vectors and ML-based evaluation of security events, login failures, policy triggers, and behavioral analysis enables continuous self-learning. |
Automated Protection
Dynamic discovery and policy baselining enable auto mitigation, tuning, and false positive remediation throughout the development/deployment lifecycle and beyond.
Adaptive Security
Autonomous security countermeasures that react as attackers retool deceives and convicts bad actors without relying on mitigations that disrupt the customer experience.
Distributed Platform
Unified application fabric deploys security on-demand where needed for consistent protection from app to edge.
Ecosystem Integration
API-driven deployment and maintenance that easily integrates into broader development frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and event management systems.
Credential Stuffing Attack Example
| Condition | Identification |
|---|---|
Abuse
|
Anomaly detection
|
Intent
|
Behavioral analysis
|
Origination
|
Stage 1 ML
|
Evasion
|
Stage 2 ML
|
Accurate detection and auto mitigation
Credential Stuffing Playbook
