The application delivery controller is a key component within enterprise and cloud data centers to improve availability, security and performance of applications. Application delivery controllers (ADCs) provide functions that optimize delivery of enterprise applications across the network. ADCs provide functionality for both user-to-application and application-to-application traffic, and effectively bridge the gap between the application and underlying protocols and traditional packet-based networks. This market evolved from the load-balancing systems that were developed in the latter half of the 1990s to ensure the availability and scalability of websites. Enterprises use ADCs today to improve the availability, scalability, end-user performance, data center resource utilization, security of their applications.
Cloud Computing refers to products and services that enable the delivery, management, and optimization of computing resources over the internet. This category includes markets that focus on empowering organizations to seamlessly store, migrate, manage, and optimize workloads across diverse cloud environments, including public, private, hybrid, and multi-cloud models.
Gartner defines cloud web application and API protection (WAAP) as a category of security solutions designed to protect web applications and APIs from different types of attacks, irrespective of the hosting location. Typically delivered as a service, cloud WAAP is a consolidation of multiple capabilities offered as a series of security modules and designed to protect against a broad range of runtime attacks. Core capabilities are web application firewalls (WAFs), distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, protection against advanced API attacks and automated (bot) traffic management. A cloud WAAP solution must incorporate all four core capabilities within the same offering.
Gartner defines data loss prevention (DLP) as a technical control designed to prevent data loss in order to comply with personal data regulations, prevent unintended disclosure, minimize insider risk and ensure that sensitive data is not overly accessible. DLP controls are typically applied to reduce the data risk for two states of unstructured data: data at rest and data in motion. Depending on the state of the data, DLP applies detective, preventive or corrective controls, including alerting, quarantining, blocking, redaction or access restriction.
Gartner defines digital communications governance and archiving (DCGA) solutions as designed to enforce corporate governance and regulatory compliance, and derive insights from an evolving number of digital communications tools utilized by organizations. For the various communications tools in use across the enterprise, DCGA solutions enable consistent policy management and enforcement, reveal new data insights, and provide reporting capabilities of their use. Organizations utilize DCGA solutions to proactively manage, monitor, collect and archive communications content. They are critical to an organizations’ efforts to meet a growing number of regulatory compliance mandates and an expanding scope of organizational communications governance and data insights. Compliance requirements include monitoring, oversight, audits and investigations for regulated industries such as financial services and health sciences. They also extend to investigation requirements of the public sector to respond to public records requests. Corporate governance requirements include employee conduct and handling of sensitive data in the use of digital communication tools.
Gartner defines an email security solution as a product that secures email infrastructure. Its primary purpose is to protect against malicious messages (phishing, social engineering, malware) or unsolicited messages (spam, marketing). Other functions include email data protection; domain-based message authentication, reporting and conformance (DMARC); investigation; and remediation through a dedicated console. Email security solutions may also support nonemail collaboration tools, such as those for document management and instant messaging. Email security tools protect an organization’s email from spam, phishing, malware attacks, account takeover and data loss. They may provide capabilities for data loss prevention, encryption, domain authentication and security education, as well as advanced protections against business email compromise. Email security platforms give cybersecurity teams visibility into email-related security incidents, support investigation and automated remediation, and enable management of both inbound and outbound email delivery. Email security solutions often integrate with other network, identity and endpoint security controls, and may also support collaboration tools and email relay capabilities.
Extended detection and response (XDR) delivers security incident detection and automated response capabilities for security infrastructure. XDR integrates threat intelligence and telemetry data from multiple sources with security analytics to provide contextualization and correlation of security alerts. XDR must include native sensors, and can be delivered on-premises or as a SaaS offering. Typically, it is deployed by organizations with smaller security teams.
IT Security refers to products and services that protect digital systems and data from cyber threats and unauthorized access. This category includes markets that focus on network security, identity management, data protection, and cloud security, enabling organizations to reduce risk, ensure compliance, and operate securely in a digital world.
MSSs provide organizations with a variety of management and operational services specific to security technologies and business outcomes for security. Capabilities include security monitoring, detection and response, exposure assessment and management as well as security consulting and security technology implementation. MSSs are delivered in a variety of modes, in the providers’ cloud infrastructure, as consultative engagements or through staff augmentation and on-premises. MSS providers offer a variety of different engagement models. These include heavily customized and consultancy-led models and commoditized technology management-driven experiences.
Gartner defines the network firewall market as the market for firewalls that use bidirectional stateful traffic inspection (for both egress and ingress) to secure networks. Network firewalls are enforced through hardware, virtual appliances and cloud-native controls. Network firewalls are used to secure networks. These can be on-premises, hybrid (on-premises and cloud), public cloud or private cloud networks. Network firewall products support different deployment use cases, such as for perimeters, midsize enterprises, data centers, clouds, cloud-native and distributed offices.
Gartner defines software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) as products used to connect branch locations to other enterprise and cloud locations. SD-WAN products provide dynamic path selection based on business or application policy, routing, centralized orchestration of policy and management of appliances, virtual private network (VPN) and zero-touch configuration. SD-WAN products are WAN transport/carrier-agnostic and create secure paths across physical WAN connections.
The SACBT market is characterized by vendor offerings that include one or more of the following capabilities: 1. Ready-to-use training and educational content. 2. Employee testing and knowledge checks. 3. Availability in multiple languages, natively or through subtitling or partial translation (in many cases, language support is diverse and localized). 4. Phishing and other social engineering attack simulations. 5. Platform and awareness analytics to help measure the efficacy of the awareness program. Training modules are available as cloud-hosted SaaS applications or on-premises deployments via client-managed learning management systems (LMSs), and also support the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) standard, enabling integration with corporate LMSs.