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 single-vendor secure access service edge (SASE) offerings as those that deliver multiple converged-network and security-as-a-service capabilities, such as software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), network firewalling and zero trust network access (ZTNA). These offerings use a cloud-centric architecture and are delivered by one vendor. SASE securely connects users and devices with applications. It supports branch office, remote worker and on-premises general internet security, private application access and cloud service consumption use cases.