Illumio named leader in microsegmentation by Forrester

Illumio has been named a leader in the field of microsegmentation by the independent research firm Forrester. The company's leadership status was announced in The Forrester Wave: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2024 report. Illumio received the highest scores in both the current offering and strategy categories, following an extensive evaluation of 11 microsegmentation vendors. Notably, Illumio also achieved superior scores in 16 out of the 23 evaluated criteria.

According to the report, Forrester described Illumio as “the original microsegmentation specialist,” highlighting its purpose-built design to prevent attackers from moving laterally once they breach an organisation. Forrester stated, “Illumio wants every organisation to realise a future without high-profile breaches. To help advance this lofty goal, Illumio has delivered a wide and deep raft of operational and security improvements in two years and has hundreds more features coming.”

Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio, discussed the company's foundational approach. “Illumio was founded to rethink how organisations protect themselves, focusing not on preventing breaches, but containing cyber attacks and ransomware so they don't escalate into catastrophic disasters,” Rubin said. “With the customer driving our perspective since the beginning, we have been at the forefront of the microsegmentation market, and we believe adoption and Illumio are still in the very early days of the journey. Continued recognition of our innovation and market leadership is a testament to our incredible team and a strong endorsement of our customer-led approach and strategy.”

The Forrester Research report also provided an optimistic outlook on the current state of microsegmentation, stating, “We're living in the golden age of microsegmentation.” The report advised that large organisations with mature cybersecurity programs that are on a Zero Trust journey or bolstering their defences against ransomware should consider Illumio as a top candidate.

The report offered additional praise for Illumio, stating, “Illumio excels at the operational aspects of microsegmentation.” It added that the user interface is “visually informative and the most powerful [UI] we evaluated,” and noted that “reference customers uniformly rave about the policy management and both pre-canned and customisable scheduled reporting.” Furthermore, the report mentioned, “Where Illumio really shines is letting the operator perform incident response activities like quarantine, mass quarantine, and live recovery during an active attack.”

Illumio’s Zero Trust Segmentation platform aims to prevent breaches from spreading across clouds, endpoints, and data centres. It combines a proprietary graph that continually visualises connectivity throughout the environment with AI-driven insights that identify and highlight anomalies and malicious connections. This approach provides immediate risk visibility. By establishing granular policies that permit only necessary connections, Illumio's microsegmentation capabilities work to automatically isolate breaches by reducing and restricting lateral movement, either proactively or in response to an attack.

For further details on Illumio’s recognition in the industry, interested parties are encouraged to download the full Forrester Wave: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2024 report.