New Gartner Secure Web Gateway Magic Quadrant

The new Gartner Secure Web Gateway Magic Quadrant is out for 2011. As most of you know, the Magic Quadrant is used by many large and medium enterprises as a guideline for deciding which IT products to purchase. The Secure Web Gateway report outlines those products which are typically Web Proxies (forward proxies), also known as secure web gateways.

For companies competing to be in the Magic Quadrant, the desirable corner to be in, is the upper right hand corner, also known as the "leaders" quadrant. This year, the usual suspects are in the "leaders" quadrant. Blue Coat, Cisco, McAfee and Websense are all in the "leaders" quadrant as expected, but this year, there's one additional name that's there, and it's a bit of a surprise. Zscaler was added to the leaders quadrant, and it's the only vendor on the list that isn't an on premises or appliance vendor. Instead Zscaler offers a solution that's a SaaS (Security as a Service), also known as a cloud solution. The other vendors on the list, while they offer on-premises solutions, have also started branching to the cloud as well, and offer their own SaaS based solutions as alternatives to the on-premises equipment.

For anyone considering a cloud solution, there are well-known limitations to cloud computing (control over the environment/maintenance windows, bandwidth constraints to the data centers, latency, and other issues). So it'll be interesting to see if these cloud based solutions start to take hold, and if they become the dominant solutions in recommendations like Gartner's.