International. Gartner shared its Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls publication, as has become customary, highlighting market leaders, noted for meeting the study's benchmarks to a greater extent, but also challenging brands with their ability to execute.
According to Gartner, "as network firewalls evolve into hybrid mesh firewalls with the emergence of cloud firewalls and firewall-as-a-service offerings, selecting the most appropriate vendor is a challenge."
That's why the brand valued 17 vendors in this market, with the goal of "helping risk management and security leaders make the right decision for their organization."
Important facts
Gartner points out that by 2026 more than 60% of organizations will have several types of firewalls in place, which in turn will drive the adoption of hybrid mesh firewalls. Likewise, in its official publication it assures that by the same year "more than 30% of new deployments of distributed firewalls for branch offices will be firewall-as-a-service offerings, compared to less than 10% in 2022."
Now, in light of this research Gartner defines the network firewall market as the market that "uses bi-directional stateful traffic inspection (both outbound and inbound) to protect networks. Network firewalls are implemented through hardware, virtual appliances and cloud-native controls."
He further states that firewalls are used to protect networks, whether they are on-premises, hybrid (on-premises and cloud), public cloud or private cloud. "Network firewall products support different deployment use cases, such as edge, mid-enterprise, data center, cloud, distributed office and cloud-native."
Also, understanding the report requires consideration of what Gartner describes as "core capabilities," which are networking, stateful inspection, threat detection and inspection, web filtering, logging and advanced reporting. As well as optional capabilities, which are Internet of Things (IoT) security, network sandboxing, zero-trust network access (ZTNA), operational technology (OT) security, Domain Name System (DNS) security and software-defined wide area network (SD- WAN)
Magic Quadrant results
As can be seen in the image the market leaders, who meet the highest values for 'Integrity of Vision' plus 'Ability to Execute' this time are Forninet, Palo Alto Network and Check Point Software Technologies. In the visionaries, which closely follow the leaders with the ability to execute are Hillstone Networks, Sangfor Technologies and Barracuda.
Of the latter, Hillstone welcomed the news and celebrated its ninth consecutive year in the category.
Niche players, the category with the most nominees, included Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, SonicWall, H3C, WatchGuard, Sophos and Forcepoint. Finally, as challengers, with a high 'ability to execute' rate are Cisco, Alibaba Cloud, Juniper and Huawei.
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