Hybrid Mesh Firewall

This Magic Quadrant analyses hybrid mesh firewalls, which offer unified cloud-based management across hardware, virtual and cloud deployments. Vendors can use this research to learn about HMFs that support hybrid environments with advanced CI/CD integration, native cloud features and strong threat prevention.

Market Definition

A hybrid mesh firewall (HMF) is a Mult deployment mode firewall, including hardware, virtual appliance and cloud-based options, with a unified cloud-based management plane. HMF’s are designed to support hybrid environments and evolving use cases by offering mature continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline integration, native cloud integration, and advanced threat prevention capabilities extending to Internet of Things (IoT)devices and DNS-based attacks.

With the adoption of hybrid environments, clients prefer the same firewall vendor with centralized management and visibility of firewall policies across environments to ease administration and reduce operational complexity. As a result, the demand and adoption of cloud firewalls from the same on-premises firewall vendor is growing. Hybrid mesh firewalls support this use case through hardware, virtual and dedicated cloud firewall deployment types, along with cloud-based centralized visibility and management capability.

Hybrid mesh firewalls provide support for multicloud and hybrid environment firewall use cases along with data center, enterprise perimeter and branch offices use cases. They offer advanced threat prevention, such as DNS security and IoT security. Features such as CI/CD integration and integration with native cloud controls support cloud firewall deployment use cases. The cloud-based centralized manager offers visibility and control across these firewalls deployed in hybrid environments through different deployment forms(hardware/virtual/cloud).

Report 2025

Here is a summary of the vendors featured in the Gartner magic quadrant 2025 report.
For the full analysis and detailed insights, you can read the report here and view the magic quadrant graphic here.

Market Status	Market Vendor
Leader	Fortinet
Leader	Palo Alto Networks
Leader	Check Point
Visionary	Cisco
Niche Player	Huawei
Niche Player	SonicWall
Niche Player	Sophos
Niche Player	WatchGuard
Niche Player	H3C
Niche Player	Forcepoint
Niche Player	Sangfor
Challenger	HPE (Juniper Networking)