Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls Published 1 November 2021 - ID G00740145 - 60 min read By Rajpreet Kaur, Jeremy D'Hoinne, and 2 more As new use cases for network firewalls evolve, traditional firewall vendors are acquiring or developing offerings to fulfill them, and use-case-specific vendors are emerging. This Magic Quadrant assesses 19 providers to help you make the right choice for your organization’s needs. Strategic Planning Assumptions By 2025, 30% of new deployments of distributed branch-office firewalls will switch to firewall as a service, up from less than 10% in 2021. By the end of 2025, 35% of end-user spending on network firewalls will be within larger security deals delivered by enterprise license agreement (ELA) from the same vendor, up from less than 10% in 2021. Market Definition/Description Network firewalls secure traffic bidirectionally across networks. Although these firewalls are primarily deployed as hardware appliances, clients are increasingly deploying virtual appliance firewalls, cloud-native firewalls from infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers, and firewall as a service (FWaaS) offerings hosted directly by vendors. Capabilities of network firewalls include:  Application awareness and control  Intrusion detection and prevention  Advanced malware detection  Logging and reporting Magic Quadrant Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls Source: Gartner (November 2021) 1 Vendor Strengths and Cautions Alibaba Cloud Alibaba Cloud is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. It offers a public cloud firewall called Alibaba Cloud Firewall, FWaaS and identity-based segmentation only for Alibaba Cloud customers. Alibaba Cloud Security Center enables centralized management of the firewall and other products offered by this vendor. Furthermore, the Ultimate edition of Alibaba Cloud Firewall has its own centralized manager. In addition to firewalls, Alibaba Cloud offers multiple security offerings, including, for example, distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, a web application firewall, data protection and encryption, along with managed security services. Recent updates have included the introduction of network services and multiple networksecurity-related features. Key highlights are the introduction of the Cloud Security Access Service (CSAS) in China, with application access control, URL control, zero threat 2 network access (ZTNA) intranet access control and logging capabilities, a container firewall and virtual patching. Alibaba Cloud Firewall is often shortlisted by Alibaba Cloud customers seeking an in-line stateful inspection firewall with threat inspection, application control and URL filtering capabilities. Alibaba Cloud Firewall is suitable for Alibaba customers looking for a mature cloud firewall with FWaaS capabilities.  Strengths  Market execution: Of the public cloud vendors, Alibaba has the most mature firewall offering. It has mature features such as URL filtering, application control, network sandboxing and data loss prevention (DLP), and it can fulfill the FWaaS use case, too.  Offering: Alibaba Cloud offers ZTNA as a stand-alone capability of CSAS. The vendor offers ZTNA clients for Windows and macOS, and for Android and iOS endpoints, thus covering both fixed and mobile devices.  Offering: Alibaba Cloud offers agent-based microsegmentation, in addition to the network-based segmentation that public cloud vendors generally offer. The user can create business groups and user groups for segmentation and visualization.  Customer feedback: Customers have given high scores to the advanced threat detection capability offered through an intrusion detection and prevention service (IDPS). They have also identified the logging available as granular. Cautions  Product strategy: Despite DevOps being the primary use case for cloud adoption, Alibaba Cloud Firewall lacks the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) automation features that other cloud vendors offer.  Geographic strategy: Although Alibaba Cloud has a major presence in China, its presence in Southeast Asia is limited, compared with other cloud players.  Customer feedback: Surveyed customers have described the application control feature available with the firewall as basic. Alibaba Cloud Firewall supports local Chinese applications, but has no support for third-party applications like Office 365.  Product capability: Alibaba Cloud Firewall does not offer Tra