Final month, Carlos Rivera and I revealed The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Firewalls, This autumn 2022, that includes our evaluation of 10 firewall distributors. These embrace, in alphabetical order:

• Barracuda Networks
• Verify Level Software program Applied sciences
• Cisco
• Forcepoint
• Fortinet
• Juniper Networks
• Palo Alto Networks
• SonicWall
• Sophos
• WatchGuard

Conducting a Wave analysis is an intense course of for each the analysts and the collaborating distributors. Now that it’s revealed, I really feel compelled to wax poetic and cough up some reactions.

The Foundational Community Safety Expertise

The firewall is the unique granddaddy of all community safety controls. And like an previous Timex watch, they’ve taken a licking and carry on ticking. As a lot as we, and everybody else, speak about Zero Belief and perimeter-less, identity-based architectures, the enterprise firewall market retains on increasing. Anybody trumpeting the obsolescence of this tech goes to have wait so much longer earlier than they name its time of loss of life.

Curiously, I believed that the COVID-19 pandemic that started throughout the earlier iteration of this Wave would have shrunk the market as safety professionals pivoted to securing a distant workforce. However the enterprise firewall distributors all reported important progress up to now 12 months, despite the fact that the workers who left the perimeter en masse two years in the past have but to return. In our pre-Wave report, Now Tech: Enterprise Firewalls, Q2 2022, the common bounce in firewall-associated income was 26% 12 months over 12 months.

The “huge” firewall distributors have gotten a lot greater than the smaller distributors. Truthfully, a few of the reported (confidential) income numbers listed here are eye-popping, however the smaller distributors did alright as effectively, with many reporting double-digit progress (even earlier than inflation sharply elevated).

Enterprise Firewalls Take On The Safety Expertise Hole

The first theme we detected throughout our analysis is that the distributors within the firewall market acknowledge that their prospects (ahem, that’s you) are struggling to search out and retain expert community safety techs to even configure and preserve this gear, a lot much less carry out subtle occasion analyses and disciplined incident response. To fill this hole, distributors are taking three completely different approaches:

1. Throwing their very own individuals on the downside. Most of the distributors provide a mixture of complementary after-market providers resembling incident response and managed detection and response. We analyzed these capabilities in our Wave’s incident response and supporting merchandise and repair standards.
2. Throwing different individuals’s our bodies on the downside. A managed providers supplier (MSP) or managed safety service supplier (MSSP) can handle the safety coverage for the seller’s buyer (that’s you), and the distributors are more and more constructing their options with the MSP/MSSP in thoughts. Nearly all of distributors have MSP-friendly centralized administration portals, the place the companion can log in as soon as after which handle the insurance policies of any of their shoppers. The distributors are additionally rising their enterprise give attention to working with the MSP group. We evaluated every vendor’s strategy in our Wave’s companion ecosystem and supporting merchandise and repair standards.
3. Investing in synthetic intelligence. In earlier years, the seller group touted synthetic intelligence as a safety expertise hole answer. However apart from mouthing the phrase “machine-learning fashions,” they had been unconvincing of their pitch. This 12 months was completely different: A number of of the Wave entrants fielded knowledge scientists or knowledge science groups and credibly mentioned their coaching, fashions, and the avoidance of false positives. We evaluated the seller’s AI claims in our Wave’s efficacy criterion.

You’ll be able to learn extra about every of those standards and look at every vendor’s strengths and weaknesses in our Wave report. Forrester shoppers, please attain out to schedule steerage classes or inquiries with Carlos or me to debate our findings.