Palo alto

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls
Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00174908, Greg Young, John Pescatore, 15 March 2010, RA1 09192010

The enterprise network firewall market has entered an evolutionary period, as disruption is brought on by increasingly sophisticated and targeted threats, virtualization, and business process changes. Vendors vary in their rate of innovation towardnext-generation firewall capabilities.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
The enterprise firewall market is one of the largest and most mature security markets. It is populated with mature vendors, and shortlists are fairly homogeneous among horizontal and vertical markets. Innovation has been limited, and opportunities for reducing firewall unit costs have increased because of fewer points ofdifferentiation among competing products and virtualization. Organizations’ final product selection decisions must be driven by their specific requirements, especially in the relative importance of management capabilities, ease and speed of the deployment, acquisition costs, IT organization support capabilities, and integration with the established security and network infrastructure.

MAGIC QUADRANT MarketOverview
By providing a single point of security policy enforcement that is not controllable by users or IT administrators, firewalls have long provided the most cost-effective means of protecting vulnerable PCs, servers and infrastructure from external attacks to enable secure business use of the Internet. Firewalls are a “check the box” requirement in many compliance regimes for any enterpriseto define trust boundaries. As threats have gotten more targeted and more complex, firewalls have begun to incorporate deep packet inspection intrusion prevention system (IPS) features to inspect the connections allowed through the firewall. However, business demands have changed the way IT capabilities are developed and delivered. The traditional model of users sitting at PCs on the LAN(physically and logically via virtual private network [VPN] connections) and accessing critical business data and applications from the internal data center while occasionally surfing the Web has changed. The rapid growth of business applications moving from the internal data center to external software as a service (and someday cloud services), along with the impact of what Gartner calls “theconsumerization of IT,” has rapidly changed the definition of a “trust boundary” and the types of security controls that are required at that boundary. In 2009, Gartner saw market pressures accelerate the demand for next-generation firewall platforms that provide the capability to detect and block sophisticated attacks, as well as enforce granular security policy at the application (versus port and protocol)level. A further disrupting factor is the rate of change within enterprise networking – inexorably increasing

2
throughput, more Web-based applications, more complex connections within applications, more complex data centers and more data being presented to customers means that firewalls have had to keep up with features and performance to meet these changing needs. Branch-office firewalls andsmall and midsize business (SMB) firewalls continue to diverge as increasingly distinct products, with enterprises looking to their primary firewall vendors to provide the branch-office devices, along with the management tools to handle. Although the firewall market has a relatively slow percentage of growth (appliance revenue grew 5.4% from $5.4 billion in 2007 to $5.7 billion in 2008), themarket is large, and there was a lot of market activity in 2009. Firewall sales have also included a significant software, support and subscription revenue component that is not captured as part of appliance market sizing. Figure 1. Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls

challengers

leaders

Cisco

Juniper Networks

ability to execute

Fortinet McAfee Check Point Software...