Fortinet named leader in Gartner’s 2025 hybrid mesh firewall
Fortinet has been recognised as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall, achieving the highest position for Ability to Execute.
The 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall marks the first edition of this evaluation for the category, reflecting growth in the sector as organisations confront expanding security requirements across hybrid environments. Fortinet's distinction as a Leader in this new report brings the company's presence in the annual Gartner Magic Quadrant series to 12 categories.
Leader position
Fortinet's firewalls are powered by custom-built application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) that enable accelerated performance. These solutions leverage FortiOS, an operating system designed to unify hardware and virtual deployments, and are available as appliance, virtual, and cloud-native firewalls, addressing security requirements across a range of environments including data centres, clouds, remote edges, and dynamic workloads.
Nirav Shah, Senior Vice President, Products and Solutions at Fortinet, commented on the recognition:
Being recognised as a Leader in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewall and placed highest in Ability to Execute, we believe, validates our commitment to delivering convergence and best-of-breed security with FortiOS everywhere. With FortiAI innovations, integrated security operations centre (SOC), and early adoption of post-quantum cryptography, Fortinet continues to set the standard for protecting organisations across hybrid, dynamic environments.
This acknowledgment suggests organisations may consider Fortinet when looking to partner with a vendor offering established leadership, integrated security backed by AI-powered automation, and investments into quantum-resistant cryptography.
Integrated architecture
The security architecture supporting Fortinet's recognition consolidates a unified operating system, threat intelligence from FortiGuard Labs, and AI-powered security within the Fortinet Security Fabric platform. According to the company, this approach is designed to reduce complexity, cut operational overhead, and offer centralised analytics for faster threat detection and response. The integration aims to lower overall integration costs while promoting consistent policy enforcement across deployments.
AI and quantum security
Fortinet highlights innovation in artificial intelligence as a key feature of its offering. FortiAI-Assist, the flagship solution in this domain, combines generative AI, agentic AI, and AI for IT operations (AIOps) to support network operations and security operations centre teams. This approach is designed to simplify network management, close resource gaps, and increase response speed with intelligent automation. The company is also investing in post-quantum cryptography, seeking to offer long-term data protection from potential quantum computing threats.
The company's flexible operational model is based on its FortiFlex usage-based licensing, which allows organisations to adapt their security deployments to evolving environments by paying only for the services they require. This allows customers to move between hardware, virtual, and cloud firewalls, aiming to accelerate adoption and reduce both costs and procurement delays.
Converged networking and security
Fortinet's dual recognition in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hybrid Mesh Firewalls and for Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Platforms is described by the company as indicative of its vision for converging critical networking and security functions. These functions include network firewall, software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), zero trust network access, secure web gateway, cloud access security broker (CASB), and data loss prevention (DLP), all managed through FortiOS. According to Fortinet, this integration is intended to streamline adoption and operations, reduce costs, and provide consistent secure access across diverse infrastructure types and locations.
The company states that its solutions are deployed to help enterprises keep pace with ongoing changes in the IT and threat environment, securing hybrid access needs from data centres through cloud deployments and remote endpoints.
Fortinet was recognised in 12 different Magic Quadrant reports including being named an Honorable Mention in Magic Quadrant for Data Centre Switching, for Access Management, and for Privileged Access Management.
