Forrester Named Cisco a Leader in the 2024 Microsegmentation Wave
After a rigorous evaluation of 11 microsegmentation vendors, Cisco was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegementation Solutions, Q3 2024 report. We are incredibly excited to receive this recognition, achieving the highest scores possible in 12 of the 23 evaluated criteria — defined as superior relative to others in this evaluation — including network-based enforcement, support for DevSecOps and roadmap.
In its vendor profile of Cisco, Forrester comments that we take a “more realistic, holistic approach” and that our roadmap is “complete and detailed with exciting features like eBPF and data processing unit (DPU) integration.”
With the rise of malicious attacks that spread laterally, customers must create tighter network zones to apply more granular controls, mitigating the impact. To help customers achieve their security outcomes, our microsegmentation strategy revolves around two central pillars:
- Meeting customers where their users and workloads are so we can secure them from the ground up
- Embedding security within the network down to the process level
In fact, we believe Cisco is the only leader in the Forrester Wave that offers complete network security, from the Cisco switch through the purpose-built firewall to the process within a workload that initiates the connection. We combine micro and macro segmentation into a single construct, leveraging AI to observe workload patterns for malicious and anomalous behavior, and applying immediate compensating controls and virtual patches for unknown and day zero threats. This approach provides complete visibility, faster detection and mitigation of security threats, without a patchwork of security products.
Other highlights from the Forrester report for Cisco include:
- “Cisco’s Secure Workload microsegments everything from bare metal to cloud.”
- “By owning the network infrastructure, Cisco has excellent flow and asset discovery capabilities.”
- “The vendor has strong support for microservices; development, security, and operations (DevSecOps); and public cloud-native constructs. Reference customers praise the vendor’s ability to manage all these disparate environments from the Secure Workload portal.”
As customers continue modernizing applications and datacenters while adopting the public cloud, we believe the Forrester report recognizes that Cisco Secure Workload is well-positioned to address their current and future network segmentation requirements. Secure Workload segments customers’ applications and networks agentlessly with Cisco Secure Firewall and cloud firewalls. Or customers can use a powerful agent that can be deployed to almost any modern and legacy operating system providing segmentation down to the process level. By integrating with network and security infrastructure (switches, wireless access points, load balancers, cloud providers), Secure Workload provides full visibility into how applications and workloads are interacting, creating a baseline to highlight anomalies from standard behavior. Customers can then fully automate their security workflows using the published APIs or by integrating into existing CI/CD workloads with Terraform, Ansible and Jenkins.
Cisco continues to innovate in microsegmentation through its world-class solution, acquisitions and technology investments. Below are the innovations and acquisitions Cisco has made since the last Microsegmentation Wave in 2022:
- Secure Firewall integration, enabling firewall policy automation
- Container vulnerability scanning and CVE risk prioritization (Kenna acquisition)
- Multicloud security (Valtix acquisition)
- Cloud-native networking, security and observability (Isovalent [eBPF] acquisition)
- Hyper-distributed visibility and security (Cisco Hypershield)
- AI-native management platform (Armorblox acquisition)
- Security Cloud Control management platform
For more information on Cisco’s placement as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2024 report, read the full report.
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