Illumio named Forrester leader & customer favourite

Illumio has been named a leader in Forrester's latest assessment of microsegmentation suppliers and identified as a customer favourite.

Among the 10 vendors assessed, Illumio ranked highest in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories. It also received the highest possible scores in 10 criteria, including visualisation, host-based enforcement, product security, vision and innovation.

Forrester's report evaluated providers on product features, strategy, innovation and customer experience. In its assessment, the research firm said: "Illumio excels at essential microsegmentation functions."

The report also highlighted customer feedback: "Repeat customers indicate their satisfaction with the consistently high quality of technical support, regardless of the personnel assigned to their account."

Microsegmentation tools help companies limit how attackers move across networks after an initial breach. The market has drawn attention as large organisations seek to contain cyber incidents across hybrid and multi-cloud technology estates.

Forrester said organisations with complex environments should consider Illumio's offering: "Organisations with large, heterogeneous environments focused on improving cyber resilience should consider Illumio."

Platform focus

Illumio said the recognition follows work across its platform, including Network Posture, a product designed to help customers assess security posture using real traffic data and prioritise risk reduction efforts. Its broader platform combines Insights and Segmentation in a single system to identify exposures, map attack paths and set segmentation policies.

Illumio also pointed to adoption by large corporate customers including BNP Paribas, eBay and Microsoft. According to the company, Microsoft has deployed Illumio Insights and Illumio Segmentation across its corporate IT environment.

Andrew Rubin described the ranking as validation of the company's approach to cyber resilience.

"Illumio was founded on a simple belief: breaches are inevitable, but cyber disasters are not. We have been singularly focused on one objective - reducing lateral movement and attack surface, and increasing resilience in every organisation," said Andrew Rubin, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Illumio.

Rubin added: "Being named both a Leader and a Customer Favourite reflects, to us, the strength of our technology and vision, and even more importantly our ability to deliver real outcomes and risk reduction, which is the foundation of the trust our customers place in us every day. In the modern threat world we are all now entering, defense must be coupled with resilience. Recovery is the new defense - and the new cyber."

Forrester also highlighted how Illumio has positioned microsegmentation within wider security operations: "Illumio has articulated a vision for microsegmentation as a core element of security operations."

It added that the company is broadening the intended user base for its tools: "Illumio is bridging the gap between its traditional users and other parts of the security organisation by delivering agents mapped to personas from other teams."

On usability, the report said: "Its UI provides easy access to information that supports both access control and incident response use cases."

Customer reference

Illumio also cited a customer endorsement from Microsoft. The software group's senior security leadership linked the product to the scale requirements of its internal environment.

"When we needed to bring these capabilities into Microsoft, Illumio was the only segmentation solution that would work at the scale of Microsoft and deliver in our environment," said Igor Tsyganskiy, Global CISO of Microsoft.