Report:

Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge

Top Vendor Products for Security Service Edge in 2024

• Netskope
• Palo Alto Networks
• Zscaler

Security Service Edge Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

• Netskope - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Geographic strategy: Netskope maintains POPs close to most major population centers, and claims that all its POPs have consistent bandwidth and feature availability.
  • Product offering: Netskope has a strong set of controls across all supported traffic channels, with particular strength in data security.
  • Market understanding: Netskope shows excellent understanding of the market's direction and has a leading roadmap.

  Cons:

  • Innovation: Netskope has been slow to introduce DEM features to its platform and to enhance them.
  • Sales execution: Although Netskope offers consolidated SKUs for some of its offerings, Gartner clients report that its licensing remains hard to interpret in many cases. In addition, Netskope's offering remains one of the more expensive in this market.
  • Marketing execution: Gartner estimates that Netskope's ZTNA market share and growth in 2023 were lower than those of several other vendors in this market.


• Palo Alto Networks - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Overall viability: Palo Alto Networks is financially secure. It continues to invest in, and develop, its SSE offering into a competitive offering to support the transition of its sizable customer base to cloud-delivered security services.
  • Product offering: Palo Alto Networks recently launched a new console (Strata Cloud Manager) that unifies the management of both on-premises firewalls and SSE and removes the requirement to select a management approach upon deployment.
  • Innovation: Palo Alto Networks continues to invest in engineering talent for its SSE business unit. It is also investing in its AI assistant and strong industry partnerships.

  Cons:

  • Sales execution: Gartner clients report that Palo Alto Networks' licensing model is complex and difficult to understand, with inflexible and inflated pricing during sales motions.
  • Market responsiveness: Our assessment is that Palo Alto Networks' product roadmap for RBI is insufficiently differentiated to have a significant impact on the SSE market.
  • Sales strategy: Feedback from Gartner clients indicates that Palo Alto Networks' Prisma Access still appeals primarily to the company's existing customers.


• Zscaler - Leader
  

  Pros:

  • Overall viability: Zscaler is a publicly traded company that continues to register strong revenue growth from a large base of customers. It continues to grow faster than the overall market.
  • Geographic strategy: Zscaler has POPs close to most major population centers, and operates in China. This presence is supported by a strong set of regional accreditations.
  • Marketing strategy: Zscaler has a strong marketing message that appeals to many organizations looking for a cloud-native security provider, and that generates strong mind share in this market. This results in Zscaler being frequently seen on shortlists.

  Cons:

  • Sales execution: Zscaler has a complex price list. In addition, Gartner clients have expressed frustration with Zscaler's periodic licensing updates, the need for per-bandwidth SKU add-ons for some use cases, and cost increases at renewal time.
  • Customer experience: Gartner receives feedback about performance and latency problems more frequently from Zscaler customers than is typical for other vendors in this market.
  • Product strategy: Zscaler's planned product enhancements, such as "zero-trust" SD-WAN capabilities and other roadmap items evaluated for this Magic Quadrant, are less likely to shape the broader enterprise SSE market.


• Broadcom - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Overall viability: Broadcom is a very large and financially very strong company with a range of hardware and software products.
  • Product offering: Broadcom's SSE offering has strong threat prevention and data security capabilities. In particular, it can use the same classifiers, enforcement and engine as Broadcom's Symantec DLP Core enterprise DLP offering.
  • Market record: Broadcom is a well-established vendor in the SSE space. It can integrate SSE with its on-premises web gateways and other ecosystem products, such as endpoint protection and enterprise DLP products.

  Cons:

  • Customer experience: Broadcom focuses its sales and support primarily on the largest companies worldwide. Feedback from Gartner clients indicates that they continue to seek to replace Broadcom products with products from other vendors, being dissatisfied with many aspects of Broadcom, including its sales approach and ongoing support.
  • Product offering: Broadcom lacks a unified console and control plane for administration, and its multiple consoles have disparate appearances and approaches.
  • Geographic strategy: Broadcom holds few regional security accreditations. Key omissions include Cyber Essentials in the U.K., Cloud Computing Compliance Controls Catalog (C5) in Germany and Infosec Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) in Australia.


• Cloudflare - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Sales strategy: Cloudflare has a large and established customer base and the opportunity to expand within this base with its SSE product.
  • Geographic strategy: Cloudflare maintains a very strong presence near major population centers worldwide.
  • Sales execution: Cloudflare offers a simple pricing model, with a tiered approach, including a free tier. It does not include a separate support line item in its quotes.

  Cons:

  • Product offering: Cloudflare lacks some key features in this market, including sandboxing of content, advanced DLP functionality, and customizable reporting and management. It maintains only a minimal collection of discoverable cloud services and lacks risk ratings for them.
  • Market responsiveness: As a late entrant to this market, Cloudflare has yet to fully respond to demand for common SSE features such as advanced DLP and file sandboxing. This reduces its appeal to the market's more sophisticated security teams.
  • Innovation: Cloudflare's R&D appears to be focused on closing technical gaps in its product (such as DLP and SaaS support) to catch up with mature players.


• Fortinet - Challenger
  

  Pros:

  • Sales strategy: In our assessment, Fortinet has a strong sales strategy to upsell and cross-sell to its sizable installed base.
  • Customer experience: Fortinet's customer support is robust and well regarded by Gartner clients.
  • Overall viability: Fortinet is a large, well-funded company that has stated publicly that it plans to invest in FortiSASE.

  Cons:

  • Product offering: Our assessment is that Fortinet's product is weaker than those of its competitors in all areas of evaluation for this Magic Quadrant. Its disparate consoles and loose integration of products under one SKU make for a solution suited primarily to existing Fortinet customers.
  • Geographic strategy: Fortinet's POP coverage is less than expected in this market, and the expanded network of Google-hosted POPs does not currently integrate with Fortinet's existing POP infrastructure. Customers can select only four POPs, unless they pay extra per POP for the option to select up to eight.
  • Market responsiveness: Fortinet entered this market late and lacks common SSE features such as advanced DLP, an integrated console and a unified control plane. It continues to require on-premises Fortinet appliances or virtual machines with inbound internet access open for ZTNA access.


• iboss - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Product offering: iboss offers good web security and adaptive access capabilities in its product.
  • Sales strategy: iboss's pricing model is simple, with additional features such as RBI included for all users, regardless of volume.
  • Geographic strategy: iboss has POPs located close to major population centers in most regions of the world, and can closely control data storage and processing.

  Cons:

  • Product offering: iboss has very few API integrations for SaaS applications. Its offering lacks other SaaS security features, such as SaaS security posture management (SSPM), and support for advanced API DLP use cases such as masking and tokenization of data records.
  • Overall viability: iboss is growing slower than other vendors in this market, and Gartner rarely sees it included on competitive shortlists.
  • Product strategy: In our opinion, iboss's planned product enhancements, such as SD-WAN capabilities, employee monitoring and other roadmap items evaluated for this Magic Quadrant are unlikely to influence the shape of the broader enterprise SSE market.


• Lookout - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Product offering: Lookout offers strong data security capabilities in its SSE platform. These are integrated across all SSE traffic channels.
  • Market understanding: In our assessment, Lookout has a good understanding of the SSE market's direction and its competitors.
  • Sales strategy: Lookout's integration of its SSE offering with its mobile security offering may appeal to industries with a strong need for mobile SSE security.

  Cons:

  • Geographic strategy: Lookout does not operate as many POPs close to major population centers as do other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Sales execution: Lookout charges for extra elements. There are, for example, charges per SaaS application for API connections and cloud sandboxing.
  • Sales strategy: Lookout has fewer channel partners than other vendors in this Magic Quadrant (across all geographies). It relies instead on its relationships with Tier 1 telcos. Indications from Gartner clients are that Lookout rarely appears on competitive shortlists.


• Skyhigh Security - Visionary
  

  Pros:

  • Product offering: Skyhigh Security has strong data security and SaaS security capabilities.
  • Sales strategy: Skyhigh Security has invested in reestablishing its channel presence, including by hiring new leaders to drive this initiative.
  • Market understanding: Skyhigh Security maintains a clear vision of the market across all key capabilities, with a focus on a more data-centric approach.

  Cons:

  • Geographic strategy: Skyhigh Security does not run all its services in all its POPs but bases their availability on customer demand in an area. This is especially true for ZTNA and advanced services such as RBI.
  • Overall viability: Skyhigh Security is growing more slowly than other vendors in this market, and Gartner rarely sees it included on competitive shortlists.
  • Sales execution: Gartner sees Skyhigh Security as being focused largely on the government and financial services sectors and having less appeal to clients outside these areas.


• Versa Networks - Niche Player
  

  Pros:

  • Customer experience: Gartner clients generally rate the support they receive from Versa Networks as good.
  • Product offering: Versa Networks' offering provides a flexible and configurable capability for assigning and adjusting dynamic risk scores to both users and devices.
  • Geographic strategy: Versa Networks' POP network covers the majority of major population centers. A log's storage location is determined by the location of the POP that a user connects to.

  Cons:

  • Sales strategy: Gartner observes that Versa Networks sells through large global carriers, managed service providers, managed security service providers and distribution partners. There is limited consumer awareness of Versa Networks' presence in the SSE market.
  • Marketing execution: Versa Networks is rarely seen on shortlists in this market. There is less awareness of its offerings in this market among Gartner clients.
  • Product strategy: Versa's SSE platform is still catching up with capabilities such as DEM and endpoint detection and response that are already generally available in the market.

Reference

• Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Security Service Edge, 15-Apr-2024, ID G00792702

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