On Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls

For those who missed it, Gartner, Inc. recently released its Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls and it gives me pleasure to announce that we are again positioned in the “Leaders” quadrant. If you’re interested in reading the full report and see all of Gartner’s findings, you can get it here.

While the full report has a number of interesting data points about the enterprise network firewall market that are worth noting, there are three that I find particularly interesting and want to highlight to you.

1. Gartner’s report offered guidance to customers on what they should assess when they’re analyzing next-generation firewall (NGFW) capabilities. According to Gartner, “Advances in threats have driven mainstream firewall demand for next-generation firewall capabilities. Buyers should focus on the quality, not quantity, of the features and the R&D behind them. This market includes mature vendors and new entrants.”
2. The report also reflects on the increasing install and purchasing rates of next-generation firewalls by stating that, “Less than 10% of Internet connections today are secured using NGFWs. By year-end 2014, this will rise to 35% of the installed base, with 60% of new purchases being NGFWs."
3. Gartner reports that customers are not necessarily looking for a homogenous vendor environment when it comes to their network, sharing research that shows, “Through 2015, more than 75% of enterprises will continue to seek network security from a vendor different from their infrastructure vendor.”

Our interpretation of Gartner’s report, and these data points, lead us to believe that enterprises continue the widespread migration to NGFWs and the report articulates the reasons why. While these were the highlights that stood out to me, there’s much more worth reading in the entire Magic Quadrant report and I encourage you to read the complete report to learn about all of Gartner’s findings.

I wanted to close by sharing feedback one of our customers gave us after reading Gartner’s report:

“Gartner’s evaluation of Palo Alto Networks technology is refreshing to me. Four years ago we needed to refresh our firewall/IDS/IPS/web protection strategy. It was clear to me that this technology vertical needed to be reinvented. I realized then that Palo Alto was a game changer. Our investment in Palo Alto technology over the years has been critical to the success of our organization.”

We thank our customers - our partners in this journey - that continue to advocate to their peers, stakeholders, and the broader analyst community that Palo Alto Networks is the definitive leader in this transformed network security market.