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 toward next-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 …ver más…

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 “the consumerization 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 and small 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), the