Palo Alto Networks Hits The Magic Quadrant For Firewalls – Wall Street Journal (blog)
By Scott Denne
Just four years after hitting the market with its products, Palo Alto Networks has reset the standard in firewall technology.
Research firm Gartner just released its annual Magic Quadrant report for the firewall market, putting venture-backed Palo Alto Networks in the coveted leadership spot, alongside Check Point Software Technologies, the Israeli company that first commercialized the network firewall.
Palo Alto Network’s placement there, and Juniper Networks’ removal, was based largely on Gartner changing its criteria to emphasize next generation firewalls—a technology pioneered by Palo Alto Networks that lets a company control access to particular Web applications for a particular user, rather than just granting access to the Internet or cutting it off.
For example, a company could allow all employees to access the Internet, except for YouTube and Netflix. Or it could let everyone use their personal email, but not allow any attachments to be sent over those systems.
It’s not just the analysts that have taken notice. The company’s orders are on track to surpass $200 million over the next year and since August it has seen the number of customers that have deployed over $1 million of its equipment nearly double to 40.
“Over the last few years, threat vectors are increasing in complex ways and technology has not kept pace. Palo Alto Networks is one of the few that has been prescient in seeing what needed to be done,” said Mark McLaughlin, who joined the company as chief executive in August from the same post at VeriSign. “First (our competitors) tried to dismiss us and then they tried to convince (their customers) that they’ll catch up.”
Now that the threats are changing from teenage hobbyists to criminal gangs and nations with immense means at their disposal, here are some other sectors of security that could emerge as a new standard:
Vulnerability management has been the domain of consultants doing security checks every year or so, sometimes with help from enterprise software tools like IBM’s Watchfire and Hewlett-Packard’s SPI Dynamics. A younger croup of companies like Qualys, Rapid7 and WhiteHat Security now delivers these tools as a service, making them more economical and making it possible for companies to find the vulnerable spots in their networks and websites more frequently.
Advanced threat detection fills a gap where traditional virus research can no longer keep up. Now that viruses and other nasty bits change frequently and emerge by the thousands every day, it’s tough for traditional signature-based detection tools to keep up. Rather than find what’s known, companies like FireEye and Invincea have developed methods of detecting what they’ve never seen. FireEye can detect when a malicious piece of software is trying to phone home for instructions and Invincea uses behavioral analytics to detect when a PDF document or website contains a virus.
Website security and traffic optimization is so new that it’s not clear what to call this market. Companies like CloudFlare and Incapsula route visitors to a website through their own networks, scrubbing it of hackers, denial of service attacks and other unwanted traffic and speeding up the site in the process. By sharing data about attacks across a community, the services make quality security available to websites that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford it.
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