Understanding Gartner Market Guide for Cloud Web Application and API Protection: How CloudGuard WAF Sets a New Standard in Web & API Protection

How the market is evolving and why now, more than ever, you need an AI powered WAF

What defines a next-generation web application and API protection (WAAP) platform? How can security teams keep pace with today’s fast-moving, API-driven threat landscape without slowing down innovation? According to the latest Gartner Market Guide for WAAP: “Security and risk management leaders can use this market guide to analyze the cloud WAAP market and select solutions that meet their organization’s needs.”

In this article, we’ll explore key takeaways from the guide and highlight how CloudGuard WAF delivers those requirements through a prevention- first, AI-powered approach

Gartner® emphasizes “end users desire better methods of discovering threats and automatically actioning such threats. They also require lower false positive/ negative rates, and more accurate behavioral analysis through the use of AI/ML , as well as support for security upskilling and enhanced search using AI assistants.”

This reflects the need for smarter, more autonomous AI protection capabilities against today’s increasingly complex attack vectors. Check Point’s CloudGuard WAF meets this demand with a comprehensive web and API security solution that redefines traditional WAFs through innovative AI engines. Our dual-layer machine learning engine moves beyond static signature-based detection by first analyzing granular indicators of attack, then applying contextual analysis based on behavior, traffic patterns, and user reputation. This ensures proactive blocking of zero- day threats before signatures are available, while allowing legitimate user traffic to flow uninterrupted.

As a result, CloudGuard WAF delivers an industry-leading 99.3% detection rate with near-zero false positives, minimizing the need for manual tuning or intervention. Our customers were fully protected from sophisticated zero-day exploits like Log4Shell and Spring4Shell without any manual tuning or rule updates

“In addition to web application protection, a cloud WAAP offering is expected to offer robust API security features including schema validation, access control and API posture management.”

CloudGuard WAF delivers built-in API security that gives customers full control and unmatched insight across the API lifecycle. It enables automatic discovery of APIs, including shadow or undocumented APIs, ensuring comprehensive visibility across environments. With inline schema enforcement, it validates API traffic in real time, blocking deviations. Coupled with sensitive data detection and API posture management, CloudGuard WAF empowers organizations to safeguard data exposure, maintain compliance, and reduce risk throughout the entire API lifecycle.

“For DevSecOps teams, prefer cloud WAAP offerings that seamlessly integrate with existing security tools and have the capabilities to integrate with an application development life cycle where the cloud WAAP services become an integral step within a CI/CD pipeline.”

CloudGuard WAF is built for automation and agility, offering features such as auto-generated API schemas, real-time policy enforcement, and time-stamped configuration revisions. These capabilities allow security to be embedded early in the development cycle enabling developers to ship secure code faster without manual intervention. Whether in a hybrid, multi-cloud, or cloud-native setup, CloudGuard ensures that security policies are version-controlled, validated, and consistently applied across all environments.

“The cloud WAAP solution must be cloud-delivered and offered as a service.”

CloudGuard WAF delivers exactly that with its WAF-as-a-service model-a fully hosted SaaS solution designed for speed and ease of use. Security teams can deploy protection within minutes, not days, and manage policies, APIs, and threat activity across environments through a unified, centralized dashboard. This cloud-native approach reduces operational overhead, accelerates time-to-protection, and ensures consistent enforcement across multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures.

Gartner recommends: “ensure the vendor that you choose has a strong roadmap for integrating new security capabilities and features for protecting a native cloud environment and test these functions to validate that they meet your organization’s expectations. WAF, DDoS, Bot management and API protection are the core features of a WAAP solution today.”

CloudGuard WAF leverages client-side behavioral analysis to accurately distinguish malicious bots from legitimate users in real time, helping stop credential stuffing, scraping, and other automated abuse without disrupting user experience. Solution also offers built-in DDoS mitigation with adaptive rate limiting and threshold-based enforcement in SaaS model, ensuring applications remain available and responsive even during volumetric or targeted attacks.

CloudGuard WAF draws on Check Point’s proprietary ThreatCloud AI to provide real-time threat intelligence from a vast network of global sources, continuously analyzing emerging threats and vulnerabilities

“With the rise of large language models (LLMs) and GenAI applications, cloud WAAP solutions began to evolve to incorporate advanced features that enhance security and usability.”

CloudGuard WAF is evolving in step with the AI revolution, offering advanced protections tailored for modern LLM and GenAI-powered applications. It provides intelligent threat detection that adapts to dynamic AI-driven workloads, ensuring that prompt injections, banned topics, and other emerging GenAI-specific attack vectors are effectively mitigated. Through AI-enhanced traffic analysis and behavioral learning, CloudGuard delivers contextual security that distinguishes between legitimate model interactions and malicious attempts to exploit AI logic. Its native support for API protection, coupled with schema validation and rate limiting, allows organizations to confidently scale GenAI use cases without compromising security or usability.

What Sets CloudGuard WAF Apart?

• Prevention-first design with contextual AI, no signature
• Proven top-tier performance with 99.4% detection rate, 0.81% false positives based on WAF Comparison project 2025.
• Delivers 5X business value over traditional WAFs, with improved efficiency and reduced breach
• AI-powered virtual patching ensures seamless mitigation while waiting for dev
• Full API lifecycle security from discovery to enforcement, without 3rd-party

As web threats grow more dynamic and APIs become core to modern applications, organizations need a web application and API protection solution that is intelligent, scalable, and proactive. CloudGuard WAF checks all the boxes, which we believe aligns with Gartner key criteria while empowering security teams to stay ahead of evolving threats.

Read the full report here.

Disclaimer: Gartner, Market Guide for Cloud Web Application and API Protection, 14 April 2025, By Esraa ElTahawy, Adam Hils, Aaron McQuaid, Dale Koeppen

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