When cybersecurity vendors discuss innovation, they often lead with technology and focus on the latest threat. They use buzzwords like machine learning, digital transformation, shift left, behavioral analytics, or zero-trust. These are vital. But in the race to prevent the next breach, many forget a simple truth: as long as your end customer is a person, the technology must be easy to use. Otherwise, customers won't deploy it fully, administrators will misconfigure it, and developers will find a way around it. Great tech, poor outcomes.
In the web application security market, where manual tuning, exception handling, and constant updates of allow/block lists are introducing added labor and lower efficiency, this usability gap has created an opportunity for vendors who understand that delivering operational value not just superiority in security features is what wins adoption and drives long-term impact, especially in fast-moving environments like public cloud, where customers easily switch between solutions.
Theory vs. Practice
A highly secure system that is difficult to deploy, opaque to operate, or disruptive to business workflows often gets bypassed. Conflicts between application security and development teams usually result in some compromises in enforcement, as evident in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) market:
- Many legacy WAFs can block OWASP Top 10 threats with precision, but require hours of tuning, complex rule-writing, and babysitting to avoid false positives in the face of benign anomalies and unknown traffic patterns.
- Developers and DevOps teams often view traditional WAFs as blockers, not enablers slowing down release cycles or breaking app runtime.
Just imagine how false positives kill trust, how an endless number of alerts reduces team productivity, how adapting to multiple cloud providers overcomplicates enforcement consistency, or how security staff lose visibility with too many shadow APIs and open-source components the web application relies on.
The classic example is flash crowd, a scenario where a retail company rolls out a WAF in front of its e-commerce app. During the first holiday season, the WAF mistakenly blocks legitimate traffic due to overly-strict input sanitization rules, or simply due to the traffic surge. Customers are locked out of carts, sessions time out, and revenue is lost. Who gets blamed? The WAF and the security team.
In such situations, businesses tend to disable blocking entirely and switch to a monitoring mode, neutralizing the value of the WAF altogether.
In cloud-native environments, security controls must also be:
- Composable: Easily integrated via APIs, Terraform modules, or Kubernetes CRDs.
- Auto-scaling: Able to handle rapid changes in traffic and infrastructure.
- Context-aware: Understanding identities, workload behavior, and environments.
- Adaptive: Auto-tune security policies based on dynamic changes to the application.
Usability isn't just about UI. It's about the customer experience simplicity, actionable insights, and low-friction deployment. When security is usable, businesses benefit in multiple ways:
| Operational Area | Usability Benefit | Example in Web App Security |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Faster time-to-value | API-based WAF deployment in CI/CD pipeline |
| Management | Lower overhead for tuning and updates | Auto-generated, adaptive rules |
| Productivity | Devs and SecOps can collaborate rather than clash | Role-based dashboards for app owners and SecOps |
| Visibility | Clear context, risk scores, and attack attribution | ML-driven risk scoring with threat heatmaps |
| Procurement | SaaS/subscription options reduce friction | WAF-as-a-Service with usage-based billing |
| Effectiveness | High security efficacy without constant tweaking | Reduced false positives from anomaly-based ML |
Security tools must be judged not only on what they can protect against, but how they do it. Here are a few questions to ask when selecting an application security tool:
- Can a junior analyst troubleshoot it?
- Will DevOps accept it in the CI/CD pipeline?
- Does it adapt to emerging threats without constant handholding?
- Does the procurement model fit the agile business?
Bottom Line: Security as a Business Enabler
Modern cybersecurity isn't just about stopping threats. It's about enabling teams to move faster and with confidence. Cloud and web application security solutions must strike the right balance between protection and productivity. The future belongs to platforms that deliver both.
Fortinet application protection uses machine learning to accurately detect zero-day threats, identify malicious bots, and anomalous API calls. It also features threat analytics to boost productivity and reduce alert fatigue by providing insights on the most burning risks, turning hundreds of alerts into a handful of corrective actions. Lastly, as part of the FortiFlex program, it provides flexible, predictable, and controlled spending.
