Tag Archives: Forrester

Cloudflare named a Strong Performer in Email Security by Forrester

Post Syndicated from Ayush Kumar original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-named-a-strong-performer-in-email-security-by-forrester/

Today, we are excited to announce that Forrester has recognized Cloudflare Email Security as a Strong Performer and among the top three providers in the ‘current offering’ category in “The Forrester Wave™: Email, Messaging, And Collaboration Security Solutions, Q2 2025” report. Get a complimentary copy of the report here. According to Forrester:

“Cloudflare is a solid choice for organizations looking to augment current email, messaging, and collaboration security tooling with deep content analysis and processing and malware detection capabilities.”

Cloudflare’s top-ranked criteria

In this evaluation, Forrester analyzed 10 Email Security vendors across 27 different criteria. Cloudflare received the highest scores possible in nine key evaluation criteria, and also scored among the top three in the current offering category. We believe this recognition is due to our ability to deliver stronger security outcomes across email and collaboration tools. These highlights showcase the strength and maturity of our Email Security solution:

Antimalware & sandboxing

Cloudflare’s advanced sandboxing engine analyzes files, whether directly attached or linked via cloud storage, using both static and dynamic analysis. Our AI-powered detectors evaluate attachment structure and behavior in real time, enabling protection not only against known malware but also emerging threats.

Malicious URL detection & web security

URLs are analyzed at delivery and again at click-time using Cloudflare’s global network. Our OCR and machine learning models extract and analyze metadata and page behavior to determine the maliciousness of a URL. Customers can also isolate suspicious links in remote browser sessions preventing user compromise. We continuously monitor URLs and retroactively remediate messages if the risk changes.

Threat intelligence

With over 4.4 trillion signals ingested daily across DNS, HTTP, and email layers, Cloudflare operates one of the most comprehensive real-time threat intelligence ecosystems. Campaigns observed via our DNS or HTTP layers are used to preemptively block related email threats well before traditional feeds.

Content analysis & processing

Cloudflare uses an ensemble of large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and machine learning (ML) classifiers to analyze message tone, thread behavior, QR codes, and invoice language. These models detect indicators of fraud, business email compromise (BEC), and social engineering that legacy engines often miss.

Reporting & dashboards

Cloudflare’s unified Zero Trust dashboard gives SOC teams full visibility across email, web, cloud, data events. Analysts can pivot across user activity in just a few clicks and export data when needed. 

User quarantine

Our quarantine workflow is designed to minimize disruption. Customers can choose several ways to get notifications to users about messages that have been quarantined. 

Email authentication

Cloudflare enforces SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment automatically. We also offer a free DMARC reporting tool that gives customers visibility into email authentication failures and helps them take control of email brand protection.

Product security

Security is core to Cloudflare’s DNA. All services undergo continuous penetration testing, adhere to SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 standards, and operate on Cloudflare’s own infrastructure.

Partner ecosystem

Cloudflare integrates natively with Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Palo Alto XSOAR, and ServiceNow, making it easy to bring Cloudflare Email Security into existing SOC workflows. We also partner with leading human risk and awareness platforms to give organizations a more user-centric view of risk and behavior.

These strengths reflect Cloudflare’s commitment to building a comprehensive email security platform, one that’s designed to protect email inboxes and workspaces. 

Our email vision

We agree with Forrester’s perspective on where the email security market is headed. Across our customer base, from Fortune 100 enterprises to fast-growing startups, we’ve seen a clear evolution:

Phishing is no longer confined to the inbox.

Attackers are increasingly luring users into external apps, unaudited chat platforms, or legitimate third-party services, bypassing traditional security controls. This shift is forcing SOC teams to think beyond just email and adopt a more holistic approach to workspace security.

Cloudflare was one of the first vendors to position email security as part of a broader SASE and Zero Trust strategy, securing not just messages, but the entire user surface. Looking ahead, we’re doubling down on this integrated vision of workspace security to give SOC teams simpler investigations and faster response.

What’s next: our strategic focus

We will continue to:

  • Build AI-driven automation
    Reduce alert fatigue and manual triage by using LLMs to summarize incidents, auto-label threats, and recommend next steps, allowing junior analysts to act with senior-level confidence.

  • Deepen integrations across the Cloudflare ecosystem
    Continue to unify signals across email, web, cloud, and data to give security teams a single view of user behavior driving faster remediations.

  • Enhance real-time user coaching
    Deliver contextual guidance at the moment of risk, whether via banners, isolation flows, or in-app warnings, to help users make safer and more informed decisions.

  • Develop best-in-class detections
    Continue investing in advanced models detecting new and novel phishing campaigns by leveraging global telemetry from our network edge to stop novel threats faster.

Cloudflare has always approached email security not as a standalone point solution, but as a core pillar of unified threat protection, deeply integrated across the modern enterprise security stack.

Ready to enhance your email security?

We provide all organizations (whether a Cloudflare customer or not) with free access to our Retro Scan tool, allowing them to use our predictive AI models to scan existing inbox messages. Retro Scan will detect and highlight any threats found, enabling organizations to remediate them directly in their email accounts. With these insights, organizations can implement further controls, either using Cloudflare Email Security or their preferred solution, to prevent similar threats from reaching their inboxes in the future.

If you are interested in how Cloudflare can help secure your inboxes, sign up for a phishing risk assessment here. 

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .

Cloudflare named a leader in Web Application Firewall Solutions in 2025 Forrester report

Post Syndicated from Daniele Molteni original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-named-leader-waf-forrester-2025/

Forrester Research has recognized Cloudflare as a Leader in it’s The Forrester Wave™: Web Application Firewall Solutions, Q1 2025 report. This market analysis helps security and risk professionals select the right solution for their needs. According to Forrester: 

“Cloudflare is a strong option for customers that want to manage an easy-to-use, unified web application protection platform that will continue to innovate.”

In this evaluation, Forrester assessed 10 Web Application Firewall (WAF) vendors across 22 criteria, including product security and vision. We believe this recognition is due to our continued investment in our product offering. Get a complimentary copy of the report here.

Since introducing our first WAF in 2013, Cloudflare has transformed it into a robust, enterprise-grade Application Security platform. Our fully integrated suite includes WAF, bot mitigation, API security, client-side protection, and DDoS mitigation, all built on our expansive global network. By leveraging AI and machine learning, we deliver industry-leading security while enhancing application performance through our content delivery and optimization solutions.

According to the Forrester report, “Cloudflare stands out with features that help customers work more efficiently.” Unlike other solutions in the market, Cloudflare’s WAF, API Security, bot detection, client-side security, and DDoS protection are natively integrated within a single platform, running on a unified engine. Our integrated solution empowers a seamless user experience and enables advanced threat detection across multiple vectors to meet the most demanding security requirements.

Cloudflare: a standout in Application Security

Forrester’s evaluation of Web Application Firewall solutions is one of the most comprehensive assessments in the industry. We believe this report highlights Cloudflare’s integrated global cloud platform and our ability to deliver enterprise-grade security without added complexity. We don’t just offer a WAF — we provide a flexible, customizable security toolkit designed to address your unique application security challenges.

Cloudflare continuously leads the WAF market through our strategic vision and the breadth of our capabilities. We center our approach on relentless innovation, delivering industry-leading security features, and ensuring a seamless management experience with enterprise processes and tools such as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and DevOps. Our predictable cadence of major feature releases, powered by annual initiatives like Security Week and Birthday Week, ensures that customers always have access to the latest security advancements.

We believe Forrester also highlighted Cloudflare’s extensive security capabilities, with particular recognition of the significant improvements in our API security offerings.

Cloudflare’s top-ranked criteria

In the report, Cloudflare received the highest possible scores in 15 out of 22 criteria, reinforcing, in our opinion, our commitment to delivering the most advanced, flexible and easy-to-use web application protection in the industry. Some of the key criteria include:

  • Detection models: Advanced AI and machine learning models that continuously evolve to detect new threats.

  • Layer 7 DDoS protection: Industry-leading mitigation of sophisticated application-layer attacks.

  • Rule creation and modification: Simple, easy to use rule creation experience, propagating within seconds globally.

  • Management UI: An intuitive and efficient user interface that simplifies security management.

  • Product security: A robust architecture that ensures enterprise-grade security.

  • Infrastructure-as-code support: Seamless integration with DevOps workflows for automated security policy enforcement.

  • Innovation: A forward-thinking approach to security, consistently pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

What sets Cloudflare apart?

First, Cloudflare’s WAF goes beyond traditional rule-based protections, offering a comprehensive suite of detection mechanisms to identify attacks and vulnerabilities across web and API traffic while also safeguarding client environments. We leverage AI and machine learning to detect threats such as attacks, automated traffic, anomalies, and compromised JavaScript, among others. Our industry-leading application-layer DDoS protection makes volumetric attacks a thing of the past.

Second, Cloudflare has also made significant strides in API security. Our WAF can be supercharged with features such as: API discovery, schema validation & sequence mitigation, volumetric detection, and JWT authentication. 

Third, Cloudflare simplifies security management with an intuitive dashboard that is easy to use while still offering powerful configurations for advanced practitioners. All features are Terraform-supported, allowing teams to manage the entire Cloudflare platform as code. With Security Analytics, customers gain a comprehensive view of all traffic, whether mitigated or not, and can run what-if scenarios to test new rules before deployment. This analytic capability ensures that businesses can dynamically adapt their security posture while maintaining high performance. To make security management even more seamless, our AI agent, powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP), helps users craft and refine custom rules and create powerful visualizations within our analytics engine.

Cloudflare: the clear choice for modern security

We are confident that Forrester’s report validates what our customers already know: Cloudflare is a leading WAF vendor, offering unmatched security, innovation, and ease of use. As threats continue to evolve, we remain committed to pushing the boundaries of web security to protect organizations worldwide.

If you’re looking for a powerful, scalable, and easy-to-manage web application firewall, Cloudflare is the best choice for securing your applications, APIs, and infrastructure.

Ready to enhance your security?

Learn more about Cloudflare WAF by creating an account today and see why Forrester has recognized us as a leader in the market. 

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .

Cloudflare recognized as a ‘Leader’ in The Forrester New Wave for Edge Development Platforms

Post Syndicated from Rita Kozlov original https://blog.cloudflare.com/forrester-wave-edge-development-2021/

Cloudflare recognized as a 'Leader' in The Forrester New Wave for Edge Development Platforms

Cloudflare recognized as a 'Leader' in The Forrester New Wave for Edge Development Platforms

Forrester’s New Wave for Edge Development Platforms has just been announced. We’re thrilled that they have named Cloudflare a leader (you can download a complimentary copy of the report here).

Since the very beginning, Cloudflare has sought to help developers building on the web, and since the introduction of Workers in 2017, Cloudflare has enabled developers to deploy their applications to the edge itself.

According to the report by Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst, Jeffrey Hammond, Cloudflare “offers strong compute, data services and web development capabilities. Alongside Workers, Workers KV adds edge data storage. Pages, Stream and Images provide higher level platform services for modern web workloads. Cloudflare has an intuitive developer experience, fast, global deployment of updated code, and minimal cold start times.”

Cloudflare recognized as a 'Leader' in The Forrester New Wave for Edge Development Platforms

Reimagining development for the modern web

Building on the web has come a long way. The idea that one might have to buy a physical machine in order to build a website seems incomprehensible now. The cloud has played a major role in making it easier for developers to get started. However, since the advent of the cloud, things have stalled — and innovation has become more incremental. That means that while developers don’t have to think about buying a server, they’re still tasked with thinking about where in the world it is, how to add concurrency to handle increasing traffic, and how to make them secure.

We wanted to abstract that all away. Our aim: to reimagine what things might look like if developers could truly just think about the application they wanted to build. Leaving the scaling, speed, and even compliance, to us.

Of course, reimagining things is always scary. There’s no guarantee that taking a new approach is going to work — it usually requires a leap of faith.

It’s been gratifying to see developers flock to our platform — and the applications they’ve been able to build, free of scalability and latency constraints, have been phenomenal.

It’s also gratifying to be named a Leader in Edge Development Platforms by Forrester — one of the preeminent analyst firms in the industry. We feel it really does provide industry recognition to the approach we bet on four years ago.

Cloudflare is the most differentiated among all the vendors evaluated

We received a differentiated rating in the following criteria:

  • Developer experience
  • Programming model
  • Platform execution model
  • “Day 2+” experience
  • Integrations
  • Roadmap
  • Vision
  • Market approach

While being able to build our platform atop Cloudflare’s network gave us an advantage in eliminating latency from the start, we knew that wasn’t enough to compel developers to think in a new way. Since the release of Workers, we have relentlessly focused on making the experience of building a new application as easy as possible at every step of the way: from onboarding, through day 2, and beyond.

This approach extends beyond tooling, and to how we think about additional services developers need in order to complete their applications. For example, in thinking about providing data solutions on the edge, we again wanted to make the distributed nature of the system just work, rather than making developers think about it, which is what led us to develop Durable Objects. With Durable Objects, Cloudflare can make intelligent decisions about where to store the data based on access patterns (or compliance — whichever is most important to the developer), rather than forcing the developer to think about regions.

As we expand our offering, it’s important to us that it continues to be intuitive and easy for developers to solve problems.

We’re just getting started

But, we’re not stopping here. As our cofounder Michelle likes to say, we’re just getting started. We recognize this is just the beginning of the journey to bring the full stack to the edge. We have some exciting announcements coming in the next couple of weeks — stay tuned!

Cloudflare recognized as a ‘Leader’ in The Forrester Wave for DDoS Mitigation Solutions

Post Syndicated from Vivek Ganti original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-is-named-a-leader-in-the-forrester-wave-for-ddos-mitigation-solutions/

Cloudflare recognized as a 'Leader' in The Forrester Wave for DDoS Mitigation Solutions

Cloudflare recognized as a 'Leader' in The Forrester Wave for DDoS Mitigation Solutions

We’re thrilled to announce that Cloudflare has been named a leader in The Forrester WaveTM: DDoS Mitigation Solutions, Q1 2021. You can download a complimentary copy of the report here.

According to the report, written by, Forrester Senior Analyst for Security and Risk, David Holmes, “Cloudflare protects against DDoS from the edge, and fast… customer references view Cloudflare’s edge network as a compelling way to protect and deliver applications.”

Unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for all

Cloudflare was founded with the mission to help build a better Internet — one where the impact of DDoS attacks is a thing of the past. Over the last 10 years, we have been unwavering in our efforts to protect our customers’ Internet properties from DDoS attacks of any size or kind. In 2017, we announced unmetered DDoS protection for free — as part of every Cloudflare service and plan including the Free plan — to make sure every organization can stay protected and available.

Thanks to our home-grown automated DDoS protection systems, we’re able to provide unmetered and unlimited DDoS protection for free. Our automated systems constantly analyze traffic samples asynchronously as to avoid impact to performance. They scan for DDoS attacks across layers 3-7 of the OSI model. They look for patterns in IP packets, HTTP requests and HTTP responses. When an attack is identified, a real-time signature is generated in the form of an ephemeral mitigation rule. The rule is propagated to the most optimal location in our edge for the most cost-efficient mitigation: either in the Linux kernel’s eXpress Data Path (XDP), Linux userspace iptables or in the HTTP reverse-proxy. A cost-efficient mitigation strategy means that we can mitigate the most volumetric, distributed attacks without impacting performance.

Cloudflare recognized as a 'Leader' in The Forrester Wave for DDoS Mitigation Solutions

Read more about how Cloudflare’s DDoS protection systems work here.

DDoS attacks increasing

We’d like to say DDoS attacks are a thing of the past. But unfortunately, they are not.

On the contrary, we continue to see the frequency, sophistication, and geographical distribution of DDoS attacks rise every quarter – in quantity or size. See our reports from last year (Q1 ‘20, Q2 ‘20, Q3 ‘20, and Q4 ‘20) and view overall Internet traffic trends here on Cloudflare Radar.

Over the past year, Cloudflare has seen and automatically mitigated some of the largest and arguably the most creative cyber attacks. As attackers are getting bolder and smarter in their ways, organizations are looking for ways to battle these kinds of attacks with no disruption to the services they provide.

Cloudflare recognized as a 'Leader' in The Forrester Wave for DDoS Mitigation Solutions
DDoS attacks in 2020

Organizations are being extorted under threat of DDoS

In January this year, we shared the story of how we helped a Fortune Global 500 company stay online and protected whilst they were targeted by a ransom DDoS attack. They weren’t the only one. In fact, in the fourth quarter of 2020, 17% of surveyed Cloudflare customers reported receiving a ransom or a threat of DDoS attack. In Q1 2021, this increased to 26% — roughly 1 out of every 4 respondents reported a ransom threat and a subsequent DDoS attack on their network infrastructure.

Cloudflare recognized as a 'Leader' in The Forrester Wave for DDoS Mitigation Solutions

Whether organizations are targeted with ransom attacks or amateur ‘cyber vandalism’, it’s important for organizations to utilize an always-on, automated DDoS protection service that doesn’t require manual human intervention in the hour of need. We take great pride in being able to provide this level of protection to our customers.

Continuous improvement

As attacks have continued to evolve, and the number of customers using our services has increased, Cloudflare has continually invested in our technology to stay several steps ahead of attackers. We’ve made significant investments in bolstering our mitigation capacity, honing our detection algorithms, and providing better analytics capabilities to our customers. Our aim is to make impact from DDoS attacks a thing of the past, for all customers, just like spam in the 90s.

In 2019, we rolled out our autonomous DDoS detection and mitigation system, dosd. This component of our mitigation stack is fully software-defined, leverages Linux’s eXpress Data Path (XDP), and allows us to quickly and automatically deploy eBPF rules that run on each packet received for inspection — mitigating the most sophisticated attacks within less than 3 seconds on average at the edge and other common attacks instantly. It works by detecting patterns in the attack traffic and then quickly deploying rules autonomously to drop the offenders at wire speed. Additionally, because dosd operates independently within each data center, with no reliance on a centralized data center, it greatly increases the resilience of our network.

While dosd is great at mitigating attacks by detecting patterns in the traffic, what about patternless attacks? That’s where flowtrackd comes in, our novel TCP state classification engine, built in 2020, to defend against disruptive L3/L4 attacks targeting our Magic Transit customers. It’s able to detect and mitigate the most randomized, sophisticated attacks. Additionally, at L7, we also learn our customer’s traffic baselines and identify when their origin is in distress. When an origin server shows signs of deterioration, our systems begin soft mitigation in order to reduce the impact on the server and allow it to recuperate.

Building advanced DDoS protection systems is not only about the detection, but also about cost efficient mitigation. We aim to mitigate attacks without impacting performance that can be caused due to excessive computational consumption. This requirement is why we introduced IP Jails to the world: IP Jails is a gatebot capability that mitigates the most volumetric and distributed attacks without impacting performance. Gatebot activates IP Jails when attacks become significantly volumetric, and then instead of blocking at L7, IP Jails temporarily drops the connection of the offending IP address that generated the request which matched the attack signature that gatebot created. IP Jails leverages the Linux iptables mechanism to drop packets at wirespeed. Dropping L7 attacks at L4, is significantly more cost-efficient, and benefits both our customers and our Site Reliability Engineering team.

Lastly, to provide our customers better visibility and insight into the increasingly sophisticated attacks we’re seeing and mitigating, we released the Firewall Analytics dashboard in 2019. This dashboard provides insights into both HTTP application security and DDoS activity at L7, allowing customers to configure rules directly from within analytics dashboards thus tightening the feedback loop for responding to events. Later in 2020, we released an equivalent dashboard for L3/4 activity for our enterprise Magic Transit and Spectrum customers, in the form of the Network Analytics dashboard. Network Analytics provides insight into packet-level traffic and DDoS attack activity, along with periodical Insights and Trends. To complement the dashboards and provide our users the right information as they need it, we rolled out real-time DDoS alerts and also periodical DDoS reports — right into your inboxes. Or if you prefer, directly into your SIEM dashboards.

Cloudflare received the top score in the strategy category

This year, due to our advanced DDoS protection capabilities, Cloudflare received the top score in the strategy category and among the top three in the current offering category. Additionally, we were given the highest possible scores in 15 criteria in the report, including:

  • Threat detection
  • Burst attacks
  • Response automation
  • Speed of implementation
  • Product vision
  • Performance
  • Security operation center (SOC) service

We believe that our standing stems from the sustained investments we’ve made over the last few years in our global Anycast network — which serves as the foundation of all services we provide to our customers.

Our network is architected for scale — every service runs on every server in every Cloudflare data center that spans over 200 cities globally. And as opposed to some of the other vendors in the report, every Cloudflare service is delivered from every one of our edge data centers.

Integrated security and performance

A leading application performance monitoring company that uses Cloudflare’s services for serverless compute and content delivery recently told us that they wanted to consolidate their performance and security services under one provider. They got rid of their incumbent L3 services provider and onboarded Cloudflare for their application and network services (with Magic Transit) for easier management and better support.

We see this more and more. The benefits of using a single cloud provider for bundled security and performance services are plentiful:

  • Easier management — users can manage all of Cloudflare’s services such as DDoS protection, WAF, CDN, bot management and serverless compute from a single dashboard and a single API endpoint.
  • Deep service integration – all of our services are deeply integrated which allows our users to truly leverage the power of Cloudflare. As an example, Bot Management rules are implemented with our Application Firewall.
  • Easier troubleshooting — instead of having to reach out to multiple providers, our customers have a single point of contact when troubleshooting. Additionally, we provide immediate human response in our under attack hotline.
  • Lower latency — because every one of our services are delivered from all of our data centers, there are no performance penalties. As an example, there are no additional routing hops between the DDoS service to Bot Management service to CDN service.

However, not all cloud services are built the same, i.e. most vendors today do not have a comprehensive and robust solution to offer. Cloudflare’s unique architecture enables it to offer an integrated solution that comprises an all-star cast featuring the following to name a few:

  • CDN: Customer’s Choice LEADER in 2020 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Global CDN1
  • DDoS: Received the highest number of high scores in the 2020 Gartner report for Solution Comparison for DDoS Cloud Scrubbing Centers2
  • WAF: Cloudflare is a CHALLENGER in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewall (receiving the highest placement in the ‘Ability to Execute’)3
  • Zero Trust: Cloudflare is a LEADER in the Omdia Market Radar: Zero-Trust Access Report, 20204
  • Bot Management: Leader in the 2020 SPARK Matrix of Bot Management Market5
  • Integrated solution: Innovation leader in the Global Holistic Web Protection Market for 2020 by Frost & Sullivan6

We are pleased to be named a LEADER in The Forrester Wave™: for DDoS Mitigation Solutions, Q1 2021 report, and will continue to work tirelessly to remain, as the report puts it, a “compelling way to protect and deliver applications” for our customers.

For more information about Cloudflare’s DDoS protection, reach out to us here or hands-on evaluation of Cloudflare, sign up here.

1https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/global-cdn/vendor/cloudflare/product/cloudflare-cdn
2https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3983636/solution-comparison-for-ddos-cloud-scrubbing-centers
3Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls”, Analyst(s): Jeremy D’Hoinne, Adam Hils, John Watts, Rajpreet Kaur, October 19, 2020. https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints?id=1-249JQ6L1&ct=200929&st=sb
4https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/omdia-zero-trust
5https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/qks-bot-management-leader/
6https://www.cloudflare.com/lp/frost-radar-holistic-web/