The 2017 Secure Web Gateway Magic Quadrant (MQ) was released this week at the Gartner Security and Risk Summit, and I am proud that Zscaler was once again named a Leader, positioned more favorably than any other provider for “Completeness of Vision.”
I attended a conference session hosted by Gartner analyst Lawrence Orans, in which he discussed this year’s MQ for the Secure Web Gateway (SWG) market. Lawrence opened his remarks by emphasizing that all applications are moving to the cloud and users are moving off the network, and to remain relevant, infrastructure must also move to cloud. This message is in perfect alignment with Zscaler’s mission. We are eradicating the pizza boxes of legacy security appliances sitting in corporate data centers and branch offices and making them irrelevant by wrapping a secure cloud fabric around users and applications, regardless of where they are physically located.
Lawrence went on to say that Gartner wanted this MQ to specifically, “highlight vendors who embrace that vision and enable companies to move to the cloud entirely.” Lawrence referred to Zscaler several times as one of the fastest-growing vendors in this market, and one of the most innovative.
What Azure and AWS are to compute and storage, Zscaler is to security
This year more than any other, the SWG MQ demonstrates how the playing field has changed, highlighting the critical differences between a security service designed for the cloud versus legacy security vendors racking and stacking their traditional appliances in a remote data center and calling it a cloud (a lot like what we heard this week from a popular firewall vendor). Siebel Systems tried the same approach to compete with Salesforce and we know the outcome of that fight. Just as Azure and AWS have transformed the compute and storage market, Zscaler is bringing real innovation to the security market by delivering the entire gateway security stack as a cloud service and protecting users and applications at all times regardless of location.
Enterprises agree with this vision and are increasingly shifting their budgets from legacy appliances to cloud services. According to Gartner, “The historical five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of cloud services is 32% (as compared to the five-year CAGR for appliances at 5%).”
And in this rapidly growing sector of the market, Gartner attributes the highest market share to Zscaler: “Zscaler continues to be one of the fastest-growing vendors in this market, and one of the most innovative. Gartner estimates that Zscaler has more than 55% of the market share (as measured by revenue) for cloud-based SWG services.”
Our expanding market opportunity
We are gratified to see the market fully embracing our vision, not just for secure web gateways, but for a fully cloud-delivered security stack that replaces the dozens of appliances that form traditional inbound and outbound Internet gateways. By asserting that “Zscaler continues to lead the market in innovative cloud features,” the analysts bring attention to the expansion of Zscaler’s growing capabilities. Gartner remarked, “The platform now includes SWG, outbound firewall, sandboxing, Private Access (see Strengths), bandwidth control and DLP.”
We are confident that as enterprises and government agencies accelerate their movement to the cloud, they will need our scalable cloud-delivered solutions more than ever and increasingly place their trust in Zscaler.
I’d like to make a final point about this announcement. While it’s an exciting moment for Zscaler, it’s not about us. This is about the more than 5,000 organizations that have joined us, starting back in 2008, believing in the inevitability of the cloud and putting their trust in us to help them make the transformation. Thank you for allowing us to be a part of your success.
We invite you to download a copy of the 2017 Gartner Secure Web Gateway Magic Quadrant report with our compliments.
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