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.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) refers to products and services that enable machines to perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence—such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and language understanding. This category includes markets that focus on helping organizations build, deploy, and scale intelligent systems, utilizing AI across multiple industries through technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and generative AI.
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 platform as a product that secures email infrastructure. Its primary purpose is the removal of malicious (phishing, social engineering, viruses) 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. These solutions may integrate as a secure email gateway (SEG) for predelivery protection or as an integrated cloud email security (ICES) solution for postdelivery protection. Email security platforms protect an organization’s email infrastructure from social engineering, phishing, business email compromise, spam, malware attacks and data theft. These platforms are deployed independently but integrated with other network and endpoint security controls to improve the overall risk posture of the organization. They offer cybersecurity teams visibility into email-related security incidents for investigation and remediation.
Gartner defines backup and data protection platforms as technologies that capture point-in-time copies of enterprise data for the purpose of recovering it from multiple data loss scenarios, enhancing data protection initiatives, and expanding data insights and access capabilities. These technologies protect enterprise data, applications and infrastructure in hybrid, multicloud and SaaS environments. Backup and data protection platforms are available as software-only, integrated appliances and vendor-developed and hosted backup as a service (BaaS).
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.
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.