Gartner crowned Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Check Point as the top three firewall providers in its latest Magic Quadrant report.

All three vendors' now can claim double-digit firewall leader status. This year's report marks the 10th consecutive time that Palo Alto Networks has been named a leader, while Fortinet has held a place in the leader's square 12 times, and Check Point has earned the title 22 times.

According to Gartner, the three leaders offer more diverse firewall product lines or broader security portfolios for different deployment use cases compared to the other firewall vendors. 

Palo Alto Networks Zeroes In On Zero Trust

Palo Alto Networks announced several new capabilities for its network security platform a few months ago. This includes secure access across all software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, a Cloud Identity Engine to authenticate and authorize users, advanced URL filtering, and new PA-400 Series and PA-5450 firewalls.

“It becomes very important to have complete or comprehensive zero trust across the enterprise,” said Lee Klarich, chief product officer at Palo Alto Networks, adding that other vendors often focus on specific use cases for a zero-trust security approach. “Our ability to apply zero trust across the hardware, software, and secure access service edge (SASE) form factors of our network security platform allows us to apply zero trust consistently across an entire enterprise,” he told SDxCentral.

Palo Alto Networks' firewall-based SASE is one of its fastest-growing products, Klarich claims. The company recently unified its Prisma Access and SD-WAN products under a single SASE platform after the acquisition of SD-WAN vendor CloudGenix.

While Palo Alto Networks scored favorably in Gartner’s evaluation, analysts called out its premium price tag saying that it has “the most expensive product lines,” as well as its lack of a cloud-based centralized firewall manager.

Fortinet Doubles Down On Networking, Security

In this year’s report, Gartner recognized Fortinet’s FortiGate firewall product line is available for all firewall deployment use cases.

Fortinet claims it’s the only vendor placed in the "leaders" quadrant in both Gartner’s Network Firewall and WAN Edge Infrastructure Magic Quadrants for the same product: the FortiGate Next-generation Firewall. “This means Fortinet is a leader for both its networking and security capabilities, which are integrated into one product: FortiGate,” a spokesperson wrote in response to questions. 

The vendor also touted its built-in SD-WAN and zero-trust network access as two crucial capabilities to support secure work from anywhere.

However, Gartner pointed out that Fortinet lacks a dedicated container firewall, and it failed to provide basic management features through a plug-in to FortiManager.

Check Point Consolidates Security Architecture

Meanwhile, Gartner noted Check Point offers a broad security product portfolio that features Quantum-branded hardware appliances, including the new Maestro Hyperscale product line.

In addition to the Maestro products, Check Point says its consolidated security architecture, which spans networks, clouds, endpoints, mobile, and IoT, gives it an advantage in providing threat prevention against both known and unknown cyber threats.

“Security threats have become more sophisticated requiring Check Point Software to continuously improve threat intelligence, automate policy management, and deliver security architecture innovations like Maestro Hyperscale,” said Itai Greenberg, VP of product management at Check Point, in a statement.

But, Gartner notes that the vendor is losing market share as it grows more slowly than its direct competitors. The analyst firm also cited Check Point's partnership strategy for advanced SD-WAN features as a disadvantage.

Leaders Face More Challengers

Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Check Point were the same three vendors classified as leaders in the firewall market by Gartner as last year. However, the "challenger" category is more crowded this year. 

Alibaba Cloud and Microsoft joined Huawei, Juniper Networks, and Cisco as the “challengers,” meaning the vendors demonstrated the ability to execute on customer needs and have long-term viability in the market, but haven’t proven their ability to drive innovation, according to Gartner.

Alibaba Cloud did not make the firewall Magic Quadrant last year, and Gartner named Microsoft a niche player.

Hillstone Networks, Sangfor, and Barracuda moved up to “visionaries” this year from “niche players,” and Versa Networks joined the list.

Gartner classified seven vendors as niche players this year: Amazon Web Services (AWS), H3C, WatchGuard, SonicWall, Sophos, Forcepoint, and Cato Networks.

Hybrid Work Accelerates Network Security Innovations

As Palo Alto Networks’ Klarich looks to the future of network security, he expects the new norm of a hybrid workforce will continue to accelerate the need for “a network security platform, not just individual-point product.” This allows organizations to consistently apply network security across a distributed workforce, and it can also improve productivity, Klarich said.

Additionally, this requires next-generation firewalls and network security to use “another level of AI, ML” to detect “even the most sophisticated threats,” and analyze more complex data, he said.  

“Industry is going to need to move toward a model of focusing on security outcomes for our customers as opposed to simply providing them tools,” Klarich added. “What this means is really focused on what does it take for an end customer to fully adopt and apply the capabilities that they've purchased.”