Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Secure Web Gateways Can Help You Pick the Right Web Security Vendor
Selecting the right web security solution is becoming more crucial for companies concerned about advanced threats, malware infections and data theft. Vendors are promising multitudes of features, and the words "Advanced Threat Protection", "Zero Day Defense", or "DLP" are being thrown around without qualifications, leaving companies struggling to figure out who makes empty promises, and who can actually live up to their marketing. Selecting the wrong vendor with ineffective technology can be costly and dangerous.
Industry analyst reports can be extremely valuable tools for companies trying to cut through the marketing hype and narrow down the field of possible web security vendors to a few good choices. Gartner's Magic Quadrants do a great job at not only defining strengths and weaknesses for individual vendors, but also vendors and their solutions within specific categories, based on ability to execute and completeness of vision.
When it comes to web security solutions, companies should try to find answers to the following questions, in order to find the most viable web security vendor for their purposes:
- How does the vendor protect against advanced malware attacks? Any technology relying solely on signature based defenses is quickly becoming ineffective in today's world. Today's web security solutions need to have strong analytical capabilities to decide whether something poses a threat or not, even if no signature is in existence. To do this effectively, a business needs to deploy a wide array of defenses for full life cycle protection before, during, and after an attack: Before an attack security intelligence offers protection against known threats. During an attack real-time defenses protect against advanced threats and data theft. After an attack threat analysis sandboxing and forensic reporting offer valuable additional insight and analytics.
- Does the web security solution offer built-in DLP and data theft protection capabilities? Many vendors state that DLP is part of their web security solution. However a closer evaluation often reveals that either a stand-alone solution needs to be deployed with custom integration, or the DLP functionality is restricted to character matching and simple patterns known to over block and frustrate administrators. To do DLP well, a vendor needs to deploy a contextually aware DLP engine that can determine if data is at risk of being lost or stolen.
- How user friendly and useful is the reporting and threat dashboard functionality? Reporting serves as a valuable decision and information sharing tool for IT and security professionals. Threat dashboards provide visibility into critical incidents with forensic details on who was attacked, how the attack happened, where attack communications were destined, and what data was targeted. The easier and more comprehensive these tools are, and the more insight they provide, the more valuable they will be to security administrators.
- Does the vendor offer support of hybrid environments? Today's business environment proves to be complex with many endpoints and variables. Employees are no longer just working from the office. They access the corporate network from home, hotels, or public areas. They access the network from Windows, MacOS, iOS , Android, and many other devices. Web security solutions need to provide security to all of these users and scenarios in the most efficient way which often results in hybrid deployments.
- Does the vendor offer a single SKU pricing model? In today's world where companies mix and match on-premises and within cloud deployments, single SKU pricing models are convenient for customers, because they allow greater flexibility for companies deploying web security solutions.
The just-released Magic Quadrant for Secure Web Gateways offers credible, third-party insights and answers to all of the above questions and provides extremely valuable decision making tools to companies considering a new web security solution with the right functionality for today's changing web environment.
To download a copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant Secure Web Gateway report, click here.
