One of my longest and most comprehensive deep dives into the future of cybersecurity to date. This piece attempts to define the industry outlook for the next 5-10 years.
Hey Praveen, admittedly the main reason is that it focused on top cloud providers - IMB Cloud is only about ~4% of the market so not a leader. An important player though - thanks for highlighting! I know it has built a solid cyber practice.
Great articles on cybersecurity! Do you think Palo Alto's firewall business could get disrupted in the future, with the move to the cloud or with more companies taking a SASE approach?
To me, the answer to the question “will x be disrupted?” is always “yes”; everything will be. A more interesting aspect is whether or not Palo Alto will be ready or even get ahead of that disruption. Right now, everything shows that they’ve been smart about making strategic decisions. Will this change? Only the future will show. One thing I’d be mindful of is that as everything becomes API-first and built for scale, I question whether an assembly of disjointed tools can keep up with the demands of the future. That said, Palo has distribution - something very few players in security do, so I’m optimistic about its future (at least in the short term).
Overall, I think the destiny of Fortinet similar to all other large enterprises will depend on their ability to stay relevant and innovate. Not a deep insight, but that's true for many other legacy players in the space as well - Sophos, Check Point, FireEye, McAffee, Trend Micro, Proofpoint, etc. If history teaches us anything - most will die, while many will linger for decades.
Ross, great article.. any reason you didn't include IBM in your analysis ?
Hey Praveen, admittedly the main reason is that it focused on top cloud providers - IMB Cloud is only about ~4% of the market so not a leader. An important player though - thanks for highlighting! I know it has built a solid cyber practice.
Great articles on cybersecurity! Do you think Palo Alto's firewall business could get disrupted in the future, with the move to the cloud or with more companies taking a SASE approach?
To me, the answer to the question “will x be disrupted?” is always “yes”; everything will be. A more interesting aspect is whether or not Palo Alto will be ready or even get ahead of that disruption. Right now, everything shows that they’ve been smart about making strategic decisions. Will this change? Only the future will show. One thing I’d be mindful of is that as everything becomes API-first and built for scale, I question whether an assembly of disjointed tools can keep up with the demands of the future. That said, Palo has distribution - something very few players in security do, so I’m optimistic about its future (at least in the short term).
Hi Ross, thanks for the great insight! Curious to know where do you think Fortinet sits in this landscape?
Great question!
Overall, I think the destiny of Fortinet similar to all other large enterprises will depend on their ability to stay relevant and innovate. Not a deep insight, but that's true for many other legacy players in the space as well - Sophos, Check Point, FireEye, McAffee, Trend Micro, Proofpoint, etc. If history teaches us anything - most will die, while many will linger for decades.
Have a look at another piece I did about the vendor market at large: https://ventureinsecurity.net/p/why-there-are-so-many-cybersecurity