Gartner: Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms

[Petrovic]

Summary

The endpoint protection platform provides a collection of security capabilities to protect PCs, smartphones and tablets. Buyers of endpoint protection should investigate the quality of protection capabilities, the depth and breadth of features, and the ease of administration.

 

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2018, 60% of EPPs will restrict executables that have not been preinspected for security and privacy risks, up from 22% today.

 

Market Definition/Description

The enterprise endpoint protection platform (EPP) is an integrated solution that has the following capabilities:

• Anti-malware
• Personal firewall
• Port and device control

EPP solutions will also often include:

• Vulnerability assessment
• Application control (see Note 1) and application sandboxing
• Enterprise mobility management (EMM), typically in a parallel nonintegrated product
• Memory protection
• Behavioral monitoring of application code
• Endpoint detection and remediation technology (see "Market Guide for Endpoint Detection and Response Solutions" )
• Full-disk and file encryption, also known as mobile data protection
• Endpoint data loss prevention (DLP)

 

These products and features are typically centrally managed and ideally integrated by shared policies. Not all products in this analysis provide the same collection of features. Here, we focus primarily on anti-malware effectiveness and performance, management capability, protection for Windows and non-Windows platforms (such as VMware, Macintosh, Linux, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint), application control, vulnerability assessment, and emerging detection and response capabilities. See the Completeness of Vision section for more information.

 

DLP, EMM and vulnerability assessment are also evaluated in their own Magic Quadrant analyses (see the Gartner Recommended Reading section). In the longer term, portions of these markets will be subsumed by the EPP market, just as the personal firewall, host intrusion prevention, device control and anti-spyware markets have been subsumed by the EPP market. EPP suites are a logical place for the convergence of these functions. In a recent Gartner survey, 1 40% of organizations said they already use a single vendor for several EPP functions, or are actively consolidating products. In particular, mobile data protection is the leading complement to EPP, and purchasing decisions for the two products are increasingly made together. For most organizations, selecting a mobile data protection system from their incumbent EPP vendors will meet their requirements. Application control and the features of vulnerability analysis are also rapidly integrating into EPP suites. Currently, EMM is largely a separate purchase for more demanding large enterprise buyers; however, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are likely to be satisfied with EPP vendor's EMM capabilities.

 

The total EPP revenue of the Magic Quadrant participants at year-end 2014 was slightly under than $3.2 billion, up 2% over the previous year. EPP suites continue to grow in functionality. Consequently, some EPP revenue is inflow from other markets. We anticipate that growth will continue to be in the low single digits in 2016.

 

Magic Quadrant

 

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