Cisco is the only vendor named a Leader in Enterprise Firewalls Wave to also be named a leader in the Microsegmentation Solutions Wave.

Security teams are being asked to protect more than a network perimeter. People, applications, workloads, and devices now operate across data centers, clouds, campuses, branches, and containers. AI adds new applications and interactions to that environment. Yet security policy and operations are often spread across tools that were built to solve separate parts of the problem.

That gap matters. A firewall can inspect traffic at key points in the network. Microsegmentation can help teams understand and control communication between workloads. Organizations need both capabilities, working together, to protect what connects and limit how far an attacker can move.

Security has to follow the workload

Cisco has been named a Leader in both The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Firewall Solutions, Q4 2026 and The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026 evaluations. We believe those recognitions reflect an important shift: security must be able to enforce policy wherever users, applications, and workloads operate, while giving teams a practical way to manage that protection across a distributed environment.

Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall brings together Cisco and third-party firewalls in its various form factors, workload security, and distributed enforcement points into a single architecture. Cisco’s Security in Cloud Control provides a centralized place to manage policy and security operations across those environments. Cisco Secure Workload adds visibility into application behavior and enables teams to implement segmentation policies at the workload level.

A connected approach to protection

Together, these capabilities help security teams see how workloads communicate, apply controls close to the applications they protect, thereby eliminating lateral movement between systems. Teams can extend protection across environments while working from a consistent policy and unified management experience. This policy definition extends even to third-party firewalls that may be deployed in a customer’s environment.

This is increasingly important as organizations adopt AI and continue to distribute applications across hybrid environments. The goal is to give teams the visibility and flexibility to apply the right controls as needed and manage them with the least possible operational overhead.

Two evaluations. A broader security strategy.

Firewalls and microsegmentation address different parts of the security challenge. A firewall inspects and controls traffic across network boundaries. Microsegmentation helps teams understand workload relationships and eliminate lateral movement within the environment – this is the core tenant of a zero trust principles. These controls form the basis for reducing the blast radius in this highly active vulnerability disclosure state we are going through as an industry.

Connecting these approaches helps organizations protect applications from the perimeter to the workload and respond to change without managing every control in isolation.

Being named a Leader in both Forrester Wave evaluations underscores the value customers gain when these capabilities work together. Though Forrester evaluates them separately, our Hybrid Mesh Firewall brings them into one architecture and a consistent operational experience—helping organizations protect distributed environments and enforce security where it makes the most sense.

Explore the Forrester Wave reports

Learn why Cisco was named a Leader in the Forrester Wave evaluations for Enterprise Firewall Solutions and Microsegmentation Solutions.

Stay tuned for the Cisco webinar

Join me and the guest speaker, Forrester principal analyst, James Plouffe, for a discussion on how a connected firewall and microsegmentation strategy can help protect applications across distributed environments, as well as the methodology and evaluation criteria behind both Wave evaluations. Details coming soon.

Raj Chopra | SVP & Chief Product Officer, Cisco Security

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. This report is part of a broader collection of Forrester resources, including interactive models, frameworks, tools, data, and access to analyst guidance. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.

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