“Security teams seeking a customer-obsessed partner should look at Kasada.” –   The Forrester Wave™: Bot Management Software, Q3 2024

We were pleased to participate in the most recent Bot Management Software Forrester Wave™. The report, which analyzes the 11 most significant solution providers on 24 different criteria, recognizes Kasada as a Strong Performer. Kasada received a 5 out of 5 score defined as “superior relative to others in this evaluation” in 5 criteria: adoption, bot explainability, roadmap, threat research integration with product, and vision.

A few highlights from our profile in the report include:

• “Kasada stands out for customer obsession.”
• “The company has a strong, forward-looking vision that acknowledges and responds to the challenges from faster adversaries, privacy-driven signal reduction, and solver services.”

These positive words from a Forrester industry analyst are much appreciated. In addition, here are some of our own reflections that have us feeling especially good as a result of taking part in this evaluation.

Deep Commitment to Customers

Part of the evaluation requires providing customer references. These references are an important window into the company’s performance. We believe our caring relationships came across in the evaluation with uniformly happy customers. Customers tell us outright they come for our product, and then stay for our people. We are a true extension of their team.

In another example of our dedication to customers, as noted above Kasada scored a 5 out of 5, defined as “superior relative to others in this evaluation”, in the Adoption criterion – which we believe suggests our focus on ease, no maintenance, and ensuring customers are leveraging the product to its fullest were recognized. 

Vision & Roadmap

Despite all the talk of platform consolidation benefits (by the big cyber and CDN companies, of course), we are certain there’s an urgent need for specialization and best-of-breed. The bot space is a cat-and-mouse game and requires constant innovation to stay ahead.

We envision a world three years from now whereby solver services are ubiquitous and attack cycles continue to speed up. There is an existential threat in the market where these solver services erode the efficacy of most anti-bot and services by presenting them with fake data. This shift continues to accelerate quickly. As a specialist, we’ve focused investments in areas such as harvesting early warning signals to help predict fraud before it happens, polymorphic defenses that are presented differently to the attacker each time, and a proof of execution system able to ensure data authenticity (which includes forcing telemetry collection in real-time through our proprietary JavaScript virtual machine and specialized ML anti-tampering algorithms). These investments are absolute must-haves to combat the threat of solvers and faster attack cycles.

We are confident we’re making the right bets with our resources and our Forrester Wave evaluation scores in the vision and roadmap criteria helps to validate this for us. Kasada received a 5 out of 5 rating, defined as “superior relative to others in this evaluation” in both the vision and roadmap criteria. We observe the platform players continuing to expand into other areas at the expense of ensuring their anti-bot services remain ahead of the adversary.

Meanwhile, Kasada continues large investments to defend against the latest bot attacks and online fraud.

It’s also worth noting that the Forrester Wave methodology does not include assessments of software solutions’ long-term efficacy. Therefore, this Wave evaluation does not include what we believe is a key real-world decision criteria – the efficacy of a bot management solution to actually stop bots. In our experience, due to the rise of solvers and other bypass methods, efficacy is a critical buying decision.

Product Dashboards

There’s been an enormous amount of effort and energy at Kasada to uplift our portal, with simple explanations of why a request was deemed a bot or not and detailed insights into various types of blocked attacks. This was recognized in the Wave, with Kasada the only vendor in this evaluation to have scored a 5 out of 5, defined as “superior relative to others in this evaluation” in the bot explainability criterion. We’re working tirelessly to provide the experience we want our customers to have –  and it’s paying off.

We have a lot more plans to make the portal experience even better. But for now, we are thrilled by how far we’ve come in a relatively short time. The feedback from our customers on the updated portal has also been amazing and is helping to drive priority for future enhancements.

Thinking Differently

The fact that there is a Wave for bot management software implies it’s an established category. Yet since our earliest days, we believe the market is ripe for disruption. We’ve set out to create an anti-bot solution that’s superiorly effective, yet incredibly easy to use and maintain.

Ease of use, self-serviceability, and effectiveness are inextricably linked. There are always tradeoffs to be made. We do things differently. Here are some examples of architectural decisions we’ve made, contradicting the status quo, to benefit customers and their security.

• We do not require the customer to create, maintain, or customize any response policies. This greatly reduces the management overhead for customers, and ensures adversaries can’t exploit outdated policies. In our experience, customization of response rules often accidentally creates security holes. This is true for even the best-resourced and highly-skilled security teams. Instead, Kasada invested heavily to intelligently automate which responses to use based on the attack type and detections made.
• We have a detailed library of good bots and work closely with customers to configure while monitoring our customer’s traffic. Our experience tells us that allowing customers to select good bots without context and without private tokens gives adversaries an opportunity to resemble good bots through emulation in their attack campaigns.
• We are one of the few providers to not serve CAPTCHAs or visual challenge response options, ever. In addition to providing an unsatisfactory user experience, CAPTCHAs create security flaws. Most CAPTCHAs nowadays are solved with AI more quickly and accurately than humans. CAPTCHAs are welcomed by fraudsters as they present an easy way to bypass defenses, with click farm and AI-based CAPTCHA solving services readily available. Instead, we’ve developed our own invisible challenge methods without impeding the user experience.

It is our opinion that our product was scored below par for criteria where we have prioritized customer security first. We are confident in the tradeoffs made to ensure Kasada’s service remains effective for the long-term, is simple to use, and invisible to customers. Doing things differently takes courage and conviction.

Final Thoughts

As mentioned, we are pleased with the results of the Forrester Wave. Within an evaluation such as this, there are many areas for vendors to differentiate and different market segments that need to be serviced.

We’ve put a huge amount of effort into building our product, threat intelligence team, and strategy – this report provides further evidence that we are on a successful path. There are certain criteria where we respectfully disagree with the scoring of Kasada and others in our industry. We also believe certain criteria should have been added. All-in-all, the final takeaway statement from Forrester in our report profile says it all — “Security teams seeking a customer-obsessed partner should look at Kasada.”

That’s a great way to summarize Kasada and what we do best for our market. There’s a reason 85% of our customers were using another anti-bot vendor before speaking to us. Customers appreciate our transparency, accountability for stopping bad bots, and how we apply our unmatched understanding of the human minds behind automated threats.

Get started now to experience the Kasada difference firsthand.

Onward and upward!

The post Kasada’s Reflections on the Q3 2024 Forrester Wave™ – Bot Management Evaluation appeared first on Kasada.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Kasada authored by Kasada. Read the original post at: https://www.kasada.io/reflections-on-2024-forrester-wave-bot-management/