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After a rigorous evaluation of nine enterprise hybrid firewall solution vendors, Cisco has been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Hybrid Firewall 2025 Vendor Assessment. This achievement highlights our relentless innovation and dedication to solving the most complex security challenges facing organizations today with Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall.
Faced with fragmented perimeters, a volatile threat landscape, and the constant need to consolidate and simplify security tools, enterprises are consistently challenged by shifting threat landscapes, remote work requirements and deployment complexities, and shadow AI. Keeping organizations safe requires seamless integration of security throughout the network.
This recognition from the IDC MarketScape underscores our vision to deliver security wherever users, devices, and applications interact.
“We’re excited to see Cisco recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Hybrid Firewall 2025 Vendor Assessment,” said Stephanie Hagopian, VP of Security for CDW, a Cisco partner.
This report aligns with what we’ve been sharing with our customers. Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall truly embeds security right into your network with a unified way to manage everything – bringing on-prem, virtual, cloud firewall, and even workload security into one interface for a defense that’s ready for anything. It’s exactly the kind of smart, comprehensive security strategy enterprises need today.
From a partner’s viewpoint, Cisco strengthens its value by embedding security deeply and unifying management across diverse environments, enabling enterprises to confidently face today’s complex security challenges.
Fusing security into the network: Smart switches and workload agents
Security must be embedded deep within the entire infrastructure, wherever applications and workloads operate. Organizations can fuse advanced protection directly into the network by integrating with smart switches and workload agents.
This innovative approach moves granular security controls closer to the applications themselves, delivering inspection and enforcement at the access layer and throughout east-west traffic flows.
Cisco’s hybrid firewall platform excels not only at network security but at extending security throughout the network as strong integration points between firewall and traditional network components, such as smart switches and routers, as well as agent and agentless segmentation capabilities.
Integrated segmentation: Limiting lateral movement
With advanced agent and agentless segmentation capabilities, Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall gives organizations extended reach inside the network. With Cisco’s continuous analytics and adaptive security policies, organizations can ensure their microsegmentation strategy evolves in response to new threats and real-time changes in application behavior. The result: a drastically reduced attack surface, strengthened and verifiable compliance, and robust operational resilience.
AI-native policy management with Cisco Security Cloud Control
Time-consuming, manual policy management hinders operational excellence, but Cisco changes this by using AI to intelligently automate policy management in Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall, delivered by Cisco Security Cloud Control. From one place, users can orchestrate, automate, and optimize intent-based policy controls across complex environments, allowing security teams to enhance resilience with cloud-delivered, AI-driven actionable insights. This eliminates repetitive, error-prone tasks, freeing teams to focus on strategic priorities, accelerating security operations, and establishing a future-ready, intelligent defense.
Learn more
Want the detailed analysis? Check out the IDC MarketScape excerpt.
Discover more about Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall, and see how Cisco Secure Firewall recently became the first enterprise firewall to earn SE Labs AAA in Advanced Performance.
1 “IDC MarketScape Worldwide Enterprise Hybrid Firewall 2025 Vendor Assessment” August 2025, IDC #US53687925
IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of technology and service suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the circles. Vendor year-over-year growth rate relative to the given market is indicated by a plus, neutral or minus next to the vendor name.
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