Report shows rising adoption of hybrid-mesh firewalls

Gartner reports that with the advent of cloud firewalls and firewall-as-a-service products, hybrid -mesh firewalls are seeing increased acceptance among enterprises, according to SDxCentral. The newest Magic Quadrant for Network Firewall report by Gartner shows that more than 60% of enterprises should have multiple firewall deployments by 2026 and deployments of FWaaS distributed branch-office firewalls will be 30% by 2026, from 10% in 2022. The company identified core capabilities of network firewalls as including networking, threat detection and inspection, stateful inspection, advanced logging and reporting and web filtering, in addition to optional features such as IoT security, zero-trust network access, domain name system security, network sandboxing, operational technology security, and SD-WAN. According to Gartner, of the 17 network firewall vendors it assessed, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Check Point Software Technologies stood out as leaders in 2022 thanks to additions such as ZTNA for Fortinet, native integration between Palo Alto Networks firewalls and the AWS public cloud, and the new artificial intelligence-powered Quantum Titan software for Check Point.