Completeness of vision and ability to execute leads to second successive year in Visionaries Quadrant

Positive Technologies, a leading global provider of enterprise security solutions for vulnerability and compliance management, incident and threat analysis, and application protection, has been placed by Gartner, Inc. as the only Visionary in its 2016 Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls. This is the second successive year that Positive Technologies has been positioned in the Visionaries quadrant with its product PT Application Firewall (PT AF). The solution performs automatic sorting, ranking, and smart visualization of security events to identify real threats using unique attack chaining technology.

A modern enterprise uses hundreds of web, mobile, or ERP applications to help run operations. But as the number of applications grows, so does the number of security vulnerabilities within them that could be exploited to damage the business. PT Application Firewall (PT AF), a smart protection system developed by Positive Technologies, is a serious response to the security challenges created by today’s range of web portals, ERP and mobile applications. Using innovative machine learning and security technologies including real-time statistical modeling, virtual patching, and behavioral analysis tools can block even unknown zero-day attacks.

Johan Nordstrom, VP of Business Development–Application Security for Positive Technologies, explains: "Positive Technologies has always put practical security research at the heart of our development approach to ensure our solutions address the real challenges faced by enterprises on a daily basis. Nowhere is this more obvious than in PT Application Firewall.

"In 2015, we added our P-Code technology, which offers source-code analysis capabilities, as an option in all PT Application Firewall deployments. We also released special modules designed to offer targeted protection for business-critical applications such as ERP, CRM, SRM, and Big Data front-end applications including SAP HANA."

Traditional firewalls and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) no longer provide adequate protection against application-level attacks. Additionally, most existing application security testing tools are difficult to deploy and use, requiring both an advanced knowledge of how a vulnerability could affect the business and a great deal of time searching for the ones that really matter. Also, traditional web application firewalls lack the intelligence to prevent zero-day attacks and overwhelm organizations by bombarding them daily with thousands of alerts that are mostly insignificant. Mr. Nordstrom continues, "Our application security experts have spent over a decade analyzing thousands of unique applications across the entire infrastructure to provide a comprehensive and modern answer to today’s application security challenges. As an alternative, we came up with PT Application Firewall and our in-depth source code analysis solution PT Application Inspector (PT AI). Together, these two products and their features, like virtual patching and exploit generation mechanisms, provide continuous and automated detection, verification, and blocking of vulnerabilities. This expands the SSDL process to the application operation stage building up a full and continuous security framework for the whole software lifecycle."

Features like the automated incident correlation within PT AF help organizations identify and halt unfolding attacks far more quickly than before because they cut through the mass of detected incidents to highlight addressable attack chains and speed up the forensics process itself.

"We experienced high demand for our solutions last year, and we continue to invest extensively to further enhance the capabilities of PT Application Firewall and the rest of our solutions. Enterprises around the world are seeing the benefits not only of elevated security levels, but also distinct operational efficiencies thanks to our use of adaptive machine learning technology and low false positive levels," concludes Mr. Nordstrom.

"In the coming months, we have extensive plans to expand our business presence both in existing and new markets and regions. We’re looking to make alliances with technology partners and actively develop our partner network capable of vendor-independent deployment, safe in the knowledge that the Positive Technologies team is ready and willing to support the delivery of projects as and when needed. We will work tirelessly to reach as many customers as possible with our visionary solutions to provide the protection organizations deserve," adds Roy Duckles, VP of Business Development EMEA for Positive Technologies. "Using PT Application Firewall has been transformational for many of our customers. Some have gone from investigating up to a thousand separate alerts per application per day to tackling just a single, correlated incident. Put simply, organizations can reduce or refocus their skilled workforce and still block attacks swiftly." As noted in the report, Gartner estimates that the WAF market totaled about $516 million in 2015, representing a growth of 21% compared to a slightly revised 2014 estimate, due to improved visibility of Asian vendors. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Adam Hils, Claudio Neiva, 19 July 2016.

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