The 20 Coolest Network Security Companies Of 2025: The Security 100

From vendors offering SASE platforms and next-gen firewalls to those focused on protecting IoT, here’s a look at the 20 network security companies that made our Security 100 for 2025.

Whether it’s the latest iteration of network security — the secure access service edge (SASE) platform — or the next-generation firewall, there’s no lull in the demand for network security products. Network security was easily the largest technology category within cybersecurity in 2023, with revenue of $27.4 billion, according to the most recent figures available from IDC.

[Related: 10 Major Ransomware Attacks And Data Breaches In 2024]

Meanwhile, MSP executives have reported that the interest in SASE among customers is surging, even among smaller businesses. “The demand is really alive and well,” said David Gottesman, founding principal and CEO of San Francisco-based solution and service provider Epic Machines, in an interview with CRN.

Gartner’s 2024 Magic Quadrant report for providers of single-vendor SASE ranked Palo Alto Networks, Cato Networks and Netskope as the “leaders” in the market. For the “challengers” quadrant, Fortinet and Versa Networks were selected by Gartner analysts. In the “visionaries” quadrant, Cisco was the sole vendor to appear. Another three vendors — Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Cloudflare and Forcepoint — ranked in the “niche players” quadrant for single-vendor SASE, according to the Gartner report.

At the same time, some vendors have reported a rebound in firewall growth and have forecast a major refresh cycle ahead. Fortinet, for instance, saw “early upgrade movement” for firewalls with enterprises in the fourth quarter of 2024, CFO Keith Jensen said during a recent quarterly call with analysts. “We expect the momentum to build as we move into the second half of 2025.”

From vendors offering SASE platforms and next-gen firewalls to those focused on protecting IoT, here’s a look at the 20 network security companies that made our Security 100 for 2025.

Armis

Yevgeny Dibrov

Co-Founder, CEO

Armis launched a new version of its cyber exposure management platform, Centrix, with updates including the Centrix Insights AI assistant and enhanced traffic anomaly detection capabilities. The company also acquired Silk Security for risk priori­tization and Cyber Threat Cognitive Intelligence for tracking real-world exploits of vulnerabilities.

Aviatrix

Doug Merritt

Chairman, President, CEO

Aviatrix debuted its cloud net­work security PaaS offer­ing, Aviatrix PaaS. Key capabilities in the new platform include simplified customer on-boarding and improved visibility across accounts, gateways, logs and user actions, as well as automated monitoring of control-plane health for reduced operational overhead.

Cato Networks

Shlomo Kramer

Co-Founder, CEO

The company enhanced its Cato SASE Cloud plat­form with the debut of Cato Digital Experience Monitoring, providing contextual and comprehensive insight into all user experiences. Other updates to Cato’s SASE platform included the addition of threat detection, incident response and endpoint protection capa­bilities, with the launches of Cato XDR and Cato EPP.

Check Point Software Technologies

Nadav Zafrir

CEO

Check Point unveiled its new Quan­tum Firewall Software R82 with enhancements including new AI engines to provide improved threat correlation and prevention. Other moves included the acquisition of external risk management firm Cyberint Technologies and the launch of capabilities for discovery and assessment of GenAI usage across an organization.

Cisco Systems

Chuck Robbins

Chair, CEO

Cisco rolled out Hyper­shield, a new architecture that can distribute security enforce­ment across three different layers: operating systems, servers, and routers and switches. Hypershield can thus cover application services in the data center and Kubernetes clusters in the public cloud while protecting every container and virtual machine.

Claroty

Yaniv Vardi

CEO

Claroty rolled out a new version of its platform featuring improved asset visibility and options for deploy­ment in the cloud or on-premises. Key capa­bilities include exposure management, network segmentation, anomaly detection and visibility orchestration—as well as multiple distinct methods for discovery.

Corelight

Brian Dye

CEO

Recent prod­uct updates from Core­light have included Guided Triage capabilities—offering a single-screen workflow for analysts—as well as prioritized alerts and new AI-driven insight. Other key moves have included integrations with Crowd­Strike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM and with multiple SentinelOne offerings.

Darktrace

Jill Popelka

CEO

Darktrace unveiled its new ActiveAI Security Platform with capabilities including new firewall rule analysis for improved threat preven­tion and integrations with third-party network tools providing decryption keys and decrypted traffic feeds. Darktrace has said it plans to acquire cloud forensics and incident response startup Cado Security.

Dragos

Robert Lee

Co-Founder, CEO

Dragos launched a major new release of its opera­tional technology security offering, the Dragos Platform, delivering improvements to network visibility and cybersecu­rity. Key enhancements include new file ingestion functionality as well as new filtering capabilities to provide broader asset inventory views.

ExtraHop

Rob Greer

CEO

ExtraHop debuted new capabilities in its Extra­Hop RevealX platform, including network-based file analysis. The new capabilities can provide faster detection of malware as well as prevention of ransomware. The company also rolled out capabilities that enable accelerated investigation workflows via its new search and filter functionality.

Forescout Technologies

Barry Mainz

CEO

Forescout launched its new SaaS Operational Technolo­gies platform, Forescout for OT Security, with key capabilities for proactive security, exposure man­agement, threat detection and operational monitor­ing. The new platform also provides enhanced controls across cloud-based and on-premises networks.

Fortinet

Ken Xie

Co-Founder, Chairman, CEO

Fortinet updated its Unified SASE platform , FortiSASE, including upgrades for remote browser isolation enabling native configura­tion and Secure SD-WAN for improved performance. It also introduced native SCIM support to simplify management and pro­vide access support for any application through updates to Universal ZTNA.

Gigamon

Shane Buckley

President, CEO

Gigamon unveiled several joint offerings with vendors and solution provider part­ners, including an offering with Cribl and Blackwood focused on bringing enhanced observability to hybrid cloud infrastructure. It also unveiled a joint offer­ing with Dynatrace and Trace3 for improved hybrid cloud visibility.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Antonio Neri

President, CEO

HPE Aruba Networking has debuted AI-powered capabilities aimed at protecting against IoT security threats, with the launch of new security observability and monitoring capabilities. Meanwhile, the planned $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks will bring additional network security and SASE capabilities.

Illumio

Andrew Rubin

Co-Founder, CEO

Illumio made its offering for zero-trust segmenta­tion in public cloud and hybrid cloud environments, Cloud­Secure, available with a brand-new, agentless architecture. The com­pany took a fresh approach with the architecture as compared with its seg­mentation offerings for data center and endpoints, which utilize agents.

Infoblox

Scott Harrell

President, CEO

Infoblox updated its DDI offering, the Universal DDI Product Suite. Enhancements included simplified DDI manage­ment and asset visibility, which brought central­ized management of DNS, DHCP and IP addresses as well as new proactive security functionality.

Palo Alto Networks

Nikesh Arora

Chairman, CEO

Palo Alto Net­works added new features to its Prisma SASE 3.0 platform including in data security and app accel­eration. Key updates were improved accuracy for data classification through the use of LLMs. The platform also now offers a boost in application performance and adds support for unmanaged devices to its Prisma Access Browser.

SonicWall

Bob VanKirk

President, CEO

SonicWall debuted the TZ80, a small-office/ home-office network security device. The firewall provides capa­bilities including integrated ZTNA as well as VPN as-a-service to meet the needs of hybrid environ­ments. Key functionality in the TZ80 was enabled by SonicWall’s acquisition of ZTNA technologies pro­vider Banyan Security.

Vectra AI

Hitesh Sheth

President, CEO

Vectra AI provides key capabilities in its NDR offering including AI-powered, domain-specific detections as well as real-time visibility and higher-fidelity alerts. Recent updates have included proactive discov­ery of exposures in hybrid environments through Vectra AI’s Attack Signal Intelligence technology.

WatchGuard Technologies

Prakash Panjwani

CEO

WatchGuard expanded its NDR capa­bilities with the debut of ThreatSync+ NDR, bring­ing enhanced, AI-powered threat monitoring, detec­tion and remediation. The offering—which leverages WatchGuard’s acquisi­tion of CyGlass—provides improved correlation of anomalies and presents scoring and prioritization for the risks detected.