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Gartner
Critical Capabilities for Network Firewalls

Published 17 January 2022 - ID G00740373

By Adam Hils, Rajpreet Kaur

Network firewalls are key network security controls, and they are evolving to cover expanded use cases, such as the public cloud, firewall as a service and distributed edge security.

SRM leaders must evaluate network firewall capabilities against the most relevant use cases for their organizations.

Overview

Key Findings

• Firewall vendors are expanding their product offerings, but these new offerings are rarely tightly integrated with their platforms. New products often require multiple management consoles and multiple agents, and sometimes lack deep integrations between components.
• With the shift toward working from home, firewall vendors offering cloud-based security services with strong cloud security strategies are becoming more desirable to buyers.
• Cloud-first enterprises prefer firewall vendors that support the integrated management of cloud-native firewalls.
• With the shift toward a hybrid workforce, end users are finding less value in on-premises firewalls, and are instead seeking hybrid cloud security from their existing vendors.

Recommendations

Security and risk management (SRM) leaders responsible for infrastructure security and looking to evaluate firewall vendors should:

• Compare vendor products based on the business needs of the organization, rather than attempting to consolidate to a single vendor, given the wide range of offerings available. For example, a data-center-centric organization with many branches may find that pairing a best-of-breed data-center firewall vendor’s offering with that of a separate strong firewall as a service (FWaaS) vendor would maximize overall value to the organization.
• Conduct an in-depth evaluation of offerings on the basis of integration and quality of centralized management capabilities, if vendor consolidation is deemed in scope.
• If the organization’s primary goal is to migrate security capabilities in the cloud, focus on FWaaS vendors, cloud access security brokers and cloud workload protection platforms.

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2025, 30% of refresh opportunities of distributed branch-office firewalls will switch to firewall as a service, 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 enterprise license agreement from a single vendor, up from less than 10% in 2021.

What You Need to Know

Firewall vendors are currently focusing on enhancing advanced threat detection and response capabilities, Internet of Things (IoT) security, integration with the public cloud and ransomware detection and response. In response to the increasing number of hybrid workers at customer organizations, vendors are also focusing on maturing FWaaS capabilities to offer more flexible and location-independent network security controls. The firewall market has recently seen several major acquisitions, especially in the public cloud use case, which includes FWaaS, secure software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) and identity-based segmentation, also known as microsegmentation. Some vendors that provide these capabilities are being acquired by firewall vendors. Network firewall vendors are expanding their product portfolios to meet the demands of organizations that are trying to consolidate their security solutions under a single vendor.

Analysis

Critical Capabilities Use-Case Graphics

Vendors’ Product Scores for Enterprise Data Center Use Case

Source: Gartner (January 2022)

Vendors’ Product Scores for Enterprise Edge Use Case

Source: Gartner (January 2022)

Vendors’ Product Scores for Distributed Enterprise Use Case

Source: Gartner (January 2022)

Vendors’ Product Scores for Public Cloud Use Case

Source: Gartner (January 2022)

Vendors’ Product Scores for SMB Use Case

Source: Gartner (January 2022)

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