Akamai Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2024

 “We’re living in the golden age of microsegmentation,” says Forrester in the report. 

The microsegmentation landscape has dramatically shifted. Two years ago, the focus was primarily on data center applications, with little attention given to microservices or public cloud environments. Today, microsegmentation has expanded to include microservices, public cloud, OT environments, and even Layer 7 where policies can account for user identity. 

“Security teams buy microsegmentation solutions to implement Zero Trust in the network” the Forrester report states. Over the past few years, we saw how our customers were implementing microsegmentation as part of a larger Zero Trust initiative to stop lateral movement. Akamai’s Zero Trust platform, launched earlier this year, was specifically built to help businesses achieve their Zero Trust goals across all environments — from legacy to the cloud.

The Forrester report noted, “Akamai Guardicore shows off true innovation with ZTNA Integration and multifactor.”

We believe we’ve been named a leader because we are a technology innovator and have the consolidated platform that customers are looking for. The Akamai Guardicore Platform is the first security platform to combine industry-leading microsegmentation, ZTNA, and multi-factor authentication, as well as a DNS firewall — all deployed with a single agent and managed with a single console.

“The vendor has released a steady stream of microsegmentation-related capabilities like multifactor segmentation as well as integrations with the parent company’s ZTNA solution, DNS firewall, and threat intelligence (Akamai Hunt),” Forrester writes in the report.

“Akamai Guardicore has highly flexible and useful policy management, compared with competitors," Forrester writes in its report.

Akamai received the highest score possible in the Flow and Asset Discovery, and Policy Management criteria. 

With Akamai’s policy enforcement, you can easily shut down pathways to ransomware and reduce the spread of breaches moving laterally across clouds, data centers, and endpoints.

And now with the addition of AI, we’re making segmentation even simpler and faster, and in a way that requires less manual effort. Our AI implementations —  AI Labeling and AI Assistant —  are based on real capabilities that have been an integral part of our innovation journey. 

The Forrester report notes, “[Akamai] has added AI-assisted labeling to take the guesswork out of identifying the thousands of devices customers didn’t know they owned.”

According to the Forrester report “Enterprises looking for an extremely broad range of host support and outstanding flexible asset tagging system should evaluate Akamai Guardicore.” 

Akamai delivers on one of the main capabilities customers should look for when assessing microsegmentation providers: “Leading solutions enumerate microservices and public cloud applications, allowing customers to manage the policies for everything in a single console.” 

Akamai Guardicore unified architecture universally applies to all environments, protecting critical assets no matter where they are deployed — in the cloud, on-premises, virtual servers, bare metal, or containers. And when agents aren’t viable, such as in cloud PaaS environments, the platform offers agentless protection.