Five were placed in the Niche Player quadrant: Palo Alto Networks, Bitdefender, Comodo, FireEye, and Fortinet.
For comparison sake, only one vendor, ESET, fell into the Challenger Category. Of the 21 vendors in the EPP MQ, just about half of them fell into the Visionary category. However, there are still inconsistent reports concerning their support teams, and the vendor still carries a reputation for complexity and expensiveness. Symantec got good marks for stabilizing their management team at long last and for their continuing standard of comprehensiveness. Trend Micro was lauded for its patching capabilities and managed detection services but was noted to lack MacOS support for EDR. Sophos received praise for the machine learning and integration capabilities of its product, Intercept X, but they received worries about their lack of vulnerability reporting and recent changes that may hamper the Intercept X’s cloud adoption. That only leaves three Leaders in the EPP MQ: Trend Micro, Sophos, and Symantec. According to the report, this decision stemmed in part because Kaspersky only recently introduced EDR capabilities to its platform, as well as having complexity issues in management and investigation. Kaspersky Lab was bumped down to the “Visionary” Quadrant this year. One of the big changes in 2018’s EPP MQ is the loss of one of its traditional Leaders. However, Gartner stresses that just because a vendor is a Leader does not mean that it is ideal for everyone leaders may be too broad in focus for some clients or spread too thin. Gartner considers Leaders to be the vendors with “balanced and consistent progress and effort in all execution and vision categories.” They tend to have both advanced anti-malware programs and good client management skills. On the other hand, the new criteria allowed entry to four new vendors: Cisco, Endgame, Fortinet, and FireEye. Most of them appear to lack a North American presence as well. According to Gartner’s report, this is because they focused on a single segment to the detriment of others. Therefore, sometimes vendors who appeared in the MQ one year may not return for the next one.įour vendors-360 Enterprise Security Group, AhnLab, G Data Software, and Webroot-appeared in the 2017 MQ but did not make the cut for 2018. Gartner readjusts its evaluation criteria, often in response to market changes, each year. Additionally, the vendor must be capable of supporting a 10,000 seat enterprise and have some North American presence. To be considered for entry to the EPP MQ, a vendor’s solution must be capable of blocking known and unknown file-based malware, detecting malicious program behaviors, and automatically quarantining rogue programs. Gartner’s latest prediction is that EPP will provide automated, orchestrated incident investigation and responses by 2021.
In 2018, adaption and security architecture evolution dominate the field’s collective thinking. The 2018 EPP MQ is the 11th iteration of the report Gartner first introduced the category in 2007. This year the 21 vendors selected to the Endpoint Protection Platform Magic Quadrant are: Bitdefender, Carbon Black, Cisco, Comodo, CrowdStrike, Cylance, Endgame, ESET, FireEye, Fortinet, F-Secure, Kaspersky Lab, Malwarebytes, McAfee, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Panda Security, Sentinel One, Sophos, Symantec, and Trend Micro. The four categories of the Quadrant are labeled Leaders, Visionaries, Challengers, or Niche Players. The report then provides readers with a graph-the so-called Magic Quadrant-plotting the vendors based on the completeness of, and their ability to execute on their security vision. has released the annual iteration of their Magic Quadrant (MQ) Report for Endpoint Protection Protection Platforms (EPP) for 2018.įor the uninitiated, in this report, Gartner evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the 21 Endpoint Protection Platform vendors that it considers the most significant in the market based on distinct service and market share criteria. Technology research and analysis firm Gartner, Inc.