High-profile breaches, fear of unknown threats and M&A trends driving one of cyber security industry’s fastest-growing markets

AUSTIN, Texas – January 20, 2015 − NSS Labs today published its Market Analysis for Next Generation Firewall (NGFW). Since the introduction of Next Generation Firewalls in 2007, NGFW vendors have shown significant growth, closing 2013 with revenues totaling $2.87 Billion. NSS predicts that NGFW total market revenues will increase to $5.8 Billion by 2018.

In addition to the Market Analysis, NSS is publishing eleven Technology Briefs on the leading NGFW vendors and products over the next four weeks. These Briefs identify how vendors’ strategies have changed, which innovations have been introduced in the last six months, and whether historically well-performing solutions continue to be the strongest in the market.

The NGFW market has driven a great deal of change in cybersecurity infrastructure. Today’s devices are capable of performing at high throughputs with numerous functions enabled, which is encouraging many organizations to consolidate multiple features into a single NGFW device in order to better integrate security technologies and protect against increasingly advanced attacks.

Learn more: NSS Blog – NSS Research Reveals NGFW has Strengthening Role in the Enterprise

NSS’ key findings include:

• The widespread acceptance of NGFW products by enterprises reflects a change in perception of NGFW in the security market: The need for application control and advanced security has led to a high-growth market as most organizations have replaced traditional gateway devices with NGFWs.
• Most enterprises have now performed their first NGFW replacements and are moving into more traditional three-to-five year replacement cycles: Cloud-based sandboxing and endpoint protection are two new emerging features in NGFWs, and the adoption rates of those technologies will have significant influence on the market landscape.
• Availability of high performance solutions will spur continued growth of the NGFW market: Many solutions now perform at over 10 Gbps and as 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps interfaces become more common, enterprises will expand their use of NGFWs. However, feature rich deployments still have an impact on the overall box performance and this may dictate point solutions remaining the technology of choice for specific deployment use cases.

Commentary: Rob Ayoub, Research Director, NSS Labs

“Over the last several years, the NGFW market has been lucrative for many vendors and has caused significant changes in the infrastructure security landscape. However, the next several years are poised to provide numerous challenges and potential upheaval as organizations settle on specific vendors and NGFW refresh cycles become more predictable,” said Rob Ayoub, Research Director at NSS Labs. “The NGFW market is now entering its next phase, and it will be significantly affected by vendor choices regarding new technologies, alliances, and partnerships over the next three to five years.”

The NSS NGFW market coverage includes the following research briefs that will be released in the following order over the next four weeks:

• Market Analysis: Next Generation Firewall
• Technology Brief: Sophos SG-Series and Cyberoam NG-Series – NGFW
• Technology Brief: Cisco Systems ASA X-Series, FirePOWER 7000/8000 Series, Meraki MX Series – NGFW
• Technology Brief: Barracuda Networks F-Series – NGFW
• Technology Brief: Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateway – NGFW
• Technology Brief: Check Point NGFW Appliance – NGFW
• Technology Brief: Fortinet FortiGate – NGFW
• Technology Brief: Dell SonicWALL Network Security – NGFW
• Technology Brief: Watchguard XTM-Series – NGFW
• Technology Brief: McAfee NGF Series – NGFW
• Technology Brief: HP TippingPoint Network Security S-Series – NGFW
• Technology Brief: Palo Alto Networks PA Series Firewall Platform – NGFW