Enterprise Firewall Solutions

Forrester renamed this category in 2024, from Enterprise Firewalls to Enterprise Firewall Solutions, and the edition under the new name carries the sharpest comeback in the field. The evaluation has been out for nearly two years: The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Firewall Solutions, Q4 2024 published in October 2024.

The comeback belongs to Cisco. It led the 2020 edition outright, fell off the Leader rung in 2022, and climbed back in 2024 with the highest count of maximum scores in the field.

The comeback the old dogs staged

Forrester's own announcement blog is titled "Old Dogs Learn New Tricks", and the first line admits what everyone expected: "Contrary to expectations that this space might have little left to offer, enterprise firewall vendors have done well."

The market expected the firewall to retire. The firewall absorbed the market's next architectures instead. The Q4 2024 criteria score firewalls on SD-WAN, ZTNA, ZTE and SASE convergence, unified management across physical, virtual, and cloud deployments, and microperimeters. Per Forrester's Security Survey 2024, sixty one percent of large-enterprise respondents view enterprise firewalls as essential for their microsegmentation strategy.

A firewall is now scored on its SD-WAN, its ZTNA, and its microperimeters. The single-purpose tool is gone from the criteria.

The edition that is already out: The Forrester Wave: Enterprise Firewall Solutions, Q4 2024

Senior analyst Carlos Rivera announced the evaluation on October 7, 2024. It scores ten vendors against twenty seven criteria, and the report carries the identifier RES181412.

Seven of the ten have surfaced publicly. Three Leaders: Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks. Two Strong Performers per public summaries: Juniper and SonicWall. Two Contenders: Sophos and Barracuda. The remaining three vendors in the field have not been confirmed publicly, and this article assigns no names or tiers the public record does not support.

The rename is one word, and the word matters. Enterprise Firewalls became Enterprise Firewall Solutions because the product stopped being an appliance category and became a platform one. The name gained a word, and the scorecard gained the platform.

Three Leaders, three different firewalls

Palo Alto Networks took the highest Current Offering score, plus the highest possible scores in Vision, Innovation, and Roadmap. Its Strata platform manages PAN-OS firewalls and Prisma SASE together, and its Precision AI system sits across them. One detail from its announcement describes the new threat surface in one sentence: PAN-OS intercepts post-quantum cryptography traffic and downgrades risky QUIC sessions.

Fortinet took maximum scores in ten criteria: automation efficacy, DNS security, performance and optimization, pricing flexibility and transparency, SD-WAN, traffic decryption, and ZTE and SASE among them. Its position is the volume argument: more than fifty percent of the global firewall market, more than 775,000 customers, and proprietary ASICs doing the heavy lifting.

Cisco returned to the Leader rung with the highest possible scores in fifteen of the twenty seven criteria, including policy creation and management, threat intelligence, microperimeters, vision, and innovation. Forrester's phrasing: "seamless integration of AI and security in the networking fabric." Its Encrypted Visibility Engine identifies traffic behaviorally without decryption, and Snort3 with SnortML detects zero-day exploits without traditional signatures. Cisco is also the only Leader here who was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2024.

Three Leaders, three different firewalls. Palo Alto Networks sells the platform vision. Fortinet sells performance for value. Cisco sells the network fabric with AI woven in.

The 2022 leaderboard and the name that changed

The arc across three editions reads like a market arguing with itself.

In Q4 2020, the Leaders were Cisco, Check Point, and Palo Alto Networks. In Q4 2022, under the old name Enterprise Firewalls, the leaderboard flipped to the pure plays: Palo Alto Networks took the highest scores in both Current Offering and Strategy, Fortinet catapulted from sixth in strategy in 2020 to second place with maximum scores in eleven criteria, and Check Point took bronze on its "admirable vision" of making threat prevention accessible. Cisco fell out of the Leaders entirely, and the 2022 commentary noted the leaderboard now belonged to pure-play security vendors.

The 2022 field of ten: Barracuda Networks, Check Point, Cisco, Forcepoint, Fortinet, Juniper Networks, Palo Alto Networks, SonicWall, Sophos, and WatchGuard.

Then the 2024 edition, under the new name, reversed part of the argument again. Cisco's fifteen of twenty seven maximum scores is the comeback in numbers. The old dog did not learn a trick. It learned the new scorecard.

One absence deserves honesty. Check Point, the third 2022 Leader, has not surfaced in the public record of the 2024 edition, and this article will not guess where it sits. A Leader's silence is louder than its bronze, but the silence is all the record contains.

The honest limit of the comeback

Seven of ten placements is a thin public record, and the thinness itself is information. In a category where the vendors announce everything they can announce, the quiet ones are either repositioning or unimpressed with their tier.

There is also a structural overlap a buyer should notice. This Wave now scores ZTE and SASE convergence, while Forrester maintains separate SASE evaluations for solutions and services. Adjacent scorecards grading overlapping products means the same vendor can appear in several markets at once, and a buyer comparing tiers across them is comparing different criteria sets with the same names attached.

The overlap is not an error. It is the category admitting what it became. The firewall is no longer where the network security argument happens. It is where the network security argument gets enforced.

Three questions for the platform that would not retire

What does the firewall become in your environment? Appliance, service, or platform edge? The scorecard rewards unified management across physical, virtual, and cloud, but your deployment mix decides which of the three Leader philosophies fits, not the tier.

What does encrypted traffic cost you? Cisco answers with behavioral identification without decryption. Fortinet and Palo Alto Networks answer with decryption at ASIC or platform scale. Ask for the decryption and performance tradeoff on your traffic mix, in numbers.

Is this vendor your microsegmentation strategy? Sixty one percent of large enterprises say the firewall is essential to microsegmentation. If it is essential to yours, ask which scorecard the vendor's microsegmentation lives in, and demo the integration, not the slide.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

Worth reading alongside Extended Detection And Response Platforms: the evaluated field shrank from fourteen vendors to seven in two editions, and Microsoft's newest move, merging its XDR and SIEM products into one analyst experience, is treated as a scored reality rather than a roadmap promise.