Forcepoint named sole Visionary in 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for enterprise network firewalls

Sometimes it’s nice to have company; other times, it’s great to stand alone. In Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls, Forcepoint does both. We’re among just five vendors on the right-hand side of the graph while also positioned as the sole Visionary. We see this placement as a strong reflection of the depth and breadth of capabilities we’ve integrated into Forcepoint NGFW that enable organizations of all sizes to both connect and protect their distributed networks, even at global scale.

We’re honored to be called a Visionary for the second year in a row. We created Forcepoint to disrupt the cybersecurity industry—to help customers to break free from throwing billions of dollars at threat after threat without really feeling any safer. Our Human Point System focuses instead on helping enterprises, SMBs and government agencies to better understand user behavior and intent so they can more efficiently and securely bring people, applications and data together.

Connecting and Protecting – Together

Forcepoint was one of the first vendors to integrate multi-transport, multi-ISP connectivity with strong security, using the cloud to augment what is done inside the firewall itself. We provide a rich set of SD‑WAN capabilities and receive the highest security effectiveness scores in independent NGFW tests. But, that’s just the beginning. 

We take an “outside the box” approach to security, using a technique called service chaining to send traffic seamlessly from our NGFW to our Web Security Cloud and CASB (which also takes advantage of our behavioral analytics and data loss prevention technologies) to provide even deeper levels of protection. With this two-pronged approach, distributed sites can efficiently connect to the internet and protect what users do there: consume web content and use cloud applications.

Enterprise-Class Centralized Management and High Availability that’s Easy to Use

Customers tell us over and over how much they appreciate both the ease with which our firewalls are administered as well as the level of resilience and performance we’re able to deliver in environments where downtime is not an option. Our Forcepoint NGFW Security Management Center (SMC) provides zero-touch deployment, policy update approvals workflow and incident-analysis visualizations that customers often cite as key differentiators between us and other products. All of these capabilities work together, enabling us to consistently enforce policies and provide 360-degree visibility across more than 1,500 sites from a single pane of glass.

Really Strong Security

Most next generation firewalls do a decent job at spotting exploits and malware. But that’s no longer enough. With advanced evasion techniques showing up in toolkits like Metasploit and the code that was leaked by Shadow Brokers last year, thieves and attackers can camouflage their cyber footsteps like never before. That’s why we put so much effort into defeating evasions—and achieving better security effectiveness in independent tests. You can see it for yourself; we have videos on our website showing ransomware getting through other vendors’ stringent best-practices settings.

Empowering Digital Transformation

It used to be that people thought of firewalls mostly in terms of speeds and feeds—network throughput and the types of traffic that can be inspected. While these capabilities remain core to securing enterprise networks, they are just the beginning. Today, organizations are looking for new approaches as they move their computing infrastructure and processes to the cloud. The ability to transform their networks to connect and protect at massive scale without having an army of specialists has become a must-have in today’s rapidly changing world.

Gartner’s positioning of Forcepoint as the sole Visionary is exciting. We think it shows, once again, that taking the road less traveled can potentially be a better way to get you where you want to go.

Our customers—95 percent of whom, on Gartner Peer Insights, say they would recommend Forcepoint NGFW. Making them—and you—successful is what we believe it’s all about.

Forcepoint has an Overall Rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars in the Enterprise Network Firewalls market based on 52 reviews as of October 9, 2018.

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