Gartner named Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Check Point Software Technologies as leaders in its latest Magic Quadrant for Network Firewall report.

The firm noted network firewalls are evolving into hybrid-mesh firewalls with the emergence of cloud firewalls and firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) offerings. It expects more than 60% of organizations will have multiple firewall deployments by 2026, while new deployments of FWaaS distributed branch-office firewalls will increase from 10% this year to 30% by 2026.

Gartner defines the network firewall as firewalls that “use bidirectional stateful traffic inspection (for both egress and ingress) to secure networks,” which are enforced through hardware, virtual appliances, and cloud-native controls.

Gartner noted network firewalls should have core capabilities such as networking, stateful inspection, threat detection and inspection, web filtering, advanced logging and reporting, along with optional capabilities that include IoT security, network sandboxing, zero-trust network access (ZTNA), operational technology (OT) security, domain name system (DNS) security, and SD-WAN.

Gartner: 2022 network firewall top vendors

The firm accessed 17 network firewall vendors in the market, finding those three vendors as repeat peak performers.

Gartner noted Fortinet introduced ZTNA, an in-line sandbox, and an in-line cloud access security broker (CASB) this year. The vendor also announced next-generation firewalls (NGFW) for campus, branch, and hybrid data center environments and released its tailor-made firewall services for the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

Palo Alto Networks had two major firmware releases in 2022 to enhance its URL filtering, DNS security, IoT security, and threat prevention, Gartner noted. Those releases include its PAN-OS software updates and new sets of its NGFWs. The vendor also partnered with AWS to natively integrate its firewalls into the public cloud.

During the past year, Check Point released new appliances for its Quantum Lightspeed firewall product family, along with management appliances, and firewalls for midsize enterprises and branches. It also introduced its new Quantum Titan software that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning technology, while enhancing CloudGuard Workload support for OpenShift and Docker and adding microsegmentation.

Gartner also identified Cisco, Alibaba Cloud, Juniper, and Huawei as market challengers; Barracuda, Hillstone Networks, Sangfor Technologies as visionaries; and Microsoft, AWS, SonicWall, H3C, WatchGuard, Sophos, and Forcepoint as niche players in the space.