Firewall Network security

Two of our partners are a leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for network firewalls

6 min. read
Placeholder for Aerial view city streetsAerial view city streets
Fortinet
Juniper Networks
Palo Alto Networks

Share

We are proud to announce that two of our partners are a leader in the 2021 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for network firewalls: Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet. They are chosen from 19 vendors that Gartner® evaluated for this quadrant. All vendors are evaluated on the capabilities of their network firewalls, these include:

  • Application awareness and control
  • Intrusion detection and prevention
  • Advanced malware detection
  • Logging and reporting

As new use cases for network firewalls evolve, traditional firewall vendors are acquiring or developing offerings to fulfil them, and use-case-specific vendors are emerging according to Gartner®. According to them, the strategic planning assumptions are:

  • By 2025, 30% of new deployments of distributed branch-office firewalls will switch to Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), up from less than 10% in 2021.
  • By the end of 2025, 35% of end-user spending on network firewalls will be within larger security deals delivered by the Enterprise License Agreement (ELA) from the same vendor, up from less than 10% in 2021.
Placeholder for Magic Quadrant for Network FirewallsMagic Quadrant for Network Firewalls
Our Partners

Magic Quadrant™ Leaders

Two of our partners are leaders in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for network firewalls. According to Gartner® leaders execute well against their current vision and are well-positioned for tomorrow.

Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks is a leader in this Magic Quadrant™. They offer different firewalls for different deployment use cases: hardware firewalls (PA-Series), virtual firewalls (VM-Series), FWaaS (Prisma Access) and containerised firewalls (CN-Series). With Prisma Cloud, they also offer identity-based segmentation. The firewall centralised manager is Panorama, which is offered both as hardware and as a virtual appliance. In addition to firewalls, Palo Alto offers endpoint security, cloud security and security operations products.

Recent updates include new features and enhancements across the firewall offerings. Highlights include new security subscriptions, namely IoT security, enterprise DLP, SaaS security and advanced URL filtering in the latest firewall firmware. Other important updates include enhancements to the IoT security feature, threat prevention, WildFire and DNS security.

We believe that Palo Alto Networks is interesting for enterprises that are looking for firewalls that offer multiple security services to detect advanced threats. Innovating organisations like their pace of innovation. Their solutions are suitable for organisations that have multiple security needs and want to consolidate them with a single vendor.

Fortinet

Fortinet is a leader in this Magic Quadrant™. Their FortiGate firewall product line is available for all firewall deployment use cases. It is also available in virtual appliances for public cloud platforms. With their FortiSASE solution, they offer cloud-delivered security for distributed networks. FortiManager and FortiGate Cloud are Fortinet’s centralised managers. FortiAnalyzer and FortiCloud are its centralised reporting tools.

Fortinet has a broad security portfolio, which, in addition to firewalls, includes capabilities such as EDR, email security, web application firewall/web application and API protection (WAF/WAAP), network access control (NAC), deception, and identity and access management (IAM). Recent updates include the introduction of a security operations centre (SOC) as a service, SASE and ZTNA product offerings. Fortinet has also introduced enhancements to its URL filtering and advanced threat detection features. Additionally, they have introduced integration between the network operations centre (NOC) and SOC operations in the Fabric Management Center.

We believe that Fortinet is suitable for enterprises that have hardware-based firewall use cases with strong networking capabilities. Organisations who are looking to merge their solutions, because of their large product portfolio Fortinet are well suited for this.

Our partners

Magic Quadrant challengers

Two of our partners are challengers in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for network firewalls. According to Gartner® challengers execute well today or may dominate a large segment, but do not demonstrate an understanding of market direction.

Cisco

Cisco is a challenger in this Magic Quadrant™. It offers multiple firewall product lines, including Cisco Secure Firewall, Cisco Secure Workload and the Meraki MX series. In addition, Cisco offers Umbrella Secure Internet Gateway (SIG) for FWaaS, and industrial firewalls. Cisco Secure Firewall Management Centre (on-premises) and Cisco Defense Orchestrator (cloud-based) are their centralised managers.

In the past months, Cisco released six Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) virtual appliances, a container firewall and Cisco Secure Managed Remote Access, a managed VPN solution. Another important update is multi-cloud management and control with the integration of Secure Workload and Secure Firewall.

We believe Cisco is suitable for organisations looking for a single vendor in order to consolidate a wide range of network and security technologies.

Juniper Networks

Juniper is a challenger in this Magic Quadrant™. Its firewall product line is the SRX series of next-generation firewalls, which is available as hardware appliances, virtual appliances (vSRX) and containers (cSRX). vSRX can be hosted on your own hypervisor or run on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. In addition to firewalls, Juniper offers security information and event management (SIEM), DDoS mitigation and threat intelligence.

Recent updates include enhancements to advanced threat detection capabilities, IoT security, and partnerships for the industrial control system (ICS) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) environments.

We believe Juniper Networks firewalls are suitable for enterprises looking for an integrated network offering, including firewalls, from one vendor. The vSRX and cSRX firewalls are good candidates for public cloud security use cases.

Our partner

Magic Quadrant™ niche players

One of our partners is a niche player Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for network firewalls. According to Gartner® niche players focus successfully on a small segment, or are unfocused and do not out-innovate or outperform others.

Forcepoint

Forcepoint is a niche player in this Magic Quadrant™. In the past months, they introduced several new firewall models. It also brought to market a new SASE offering. Other updates included increased SD-WAN performance to enable faster SD-WAN firewall edge connectivity, further enhancements to AWS and Microsoft Azure integrations, and an additional IPS engine to enable open-source signature compatibility with Snort.

Forcepoint’s firewall appliance has built-in SD-WAN capabilities. Forcepoint also has several virtual appliance models. In addition to network firewalls, Forcepoint offers DLP, CASB and SWG product lines.

We believe Forcepoint firewalls are good to shortlist candidates for distributed office use cases where clients are looking for mature SD-WAN, VPN and centralised management capabilities. They have advanced clustering/high availability, and are also good candidates for midsize enterprises looking for a way to consolidate several SASE functions with a single vendor.

About Gartner

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls, Rajpreet Kaur, Jeremy D'Hoinne, Nat Smith, Adam Hils, 1 November 2021

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.

Sign up for our newsletter

Get the latest security news, insights and market trends delivered to your inbox.