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Fastly Gains Recognition in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™

Sean Leach

Chief Product Architect, Fastly

We’re thrilled to announce that Gartner has named us a Challenger in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Web Application and API Protection (WAAP). Ability to execute is a critical piece in the magic quadrant, and our impressive jump from Visionary to Challenger in the 2021 evaluation indicates that we have accelerated our execution in a highly competitive market.  

Acquiring Signal Sciences in October 2020 greatly expanded our WAAP portfolio and our ability to scale the protection of any app and API (cloud native, legacy, or serverless) across any architecture globally. By moving us into the Challenger quadrant, we believe Gartner recognizes the power of the acquisition and our position in the security market.

Customers validate our ability to execute

This follows our March 2021 recognition as a “Customers’ Choice” for Web Application Firewalls in the 2021 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer” report. In that report, we have one of the highest overall ratings, and we were the only vendor to make the list three years in a row. Customers gave our next-gen WAF an average of 4.9 out of 5.0 stars — and 94% said they would recommend it to others. Here’s just one piece of valued feedback from a customer: 

“Incredibly fast to implement, incredibly powerful to use. This is an excellent product that every company would benefit from leveraging in their online presence.” — Senior Manager, Application Experience in the Manufacturing Industry 

Next up for our security offering

We are integrating Fastly and Signal Sciences quickly, and continuing to innovate fast. As part of the beta availability of the Signal Sciences agent on our edge cloud platform, we’ve enabled initial agent set-up and provisioning, attack detection and blocking, and false positive mitigation. We’re working to ensure the edge deployment is fully production ready and provides full feature parity with our other next-gen WAF deployment methods, such as cloud-hosted containers, web server instances, and at various ingress points like API gateways. 

The agent integration at the edge will provide another protection deployment method to shield origin systems by blocking attacks, while improving security decisioning. Combining the precision of Signal Sciences’ detection with the scale of our edge network will empower you to stop attacks sooner by enforcing security policies at the edge.

We can’t wait to share what comes next. Stay tuned for updates, and check out the full 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application and API Protection report


Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application and API Protection, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Rajpreet Kaur, John Watts, Adam Hils, Shilpi Handa, 20th September 2021.

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

Recognized as Signal Sciences in 2019-2020. Fastly completed the acquisition of Signal Sciences on October 1, 2020. For more information visit the press release here

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