Akamai Recognized as a Strong Performer in 2026 Gartner Peer Insights^™ for Secure Enterprise Browsers

For most organizations, the majority of user activity that carries real risk now happens inside a browser tab. AI tools, software as a service (SaaS) applications, file-sharing websites, identity flows, and more, all live in the browser. 

Work no longer moves through a data center that you own, or even through traffic paths you can reliably inspect. Rather, it happens in the browser, directly on the user’s device.

That creates a visibility problem that network-based controls were never designed to solve. A secure web gateway can tell you that an employee browsed to a certain website, and a cloud access security broker (CASB) can tell you that a corporate employee account accessed a sanctioned AI tool. Neither, however, can tell you what the employee pasted into a prompt box once they got there, which account they authenticated with, or which extension quietly read the page alongside them.

The last mile between the user and the application is where the decisions that matter get made, and it's precisely the segment traditional tooling can't see into.

This is where Akamai Workforce Protector (formerly LayerX) comes in, by securing user and agentic AI and SaaS interactions, in real time, directly at the point of interaction, inside the browser. 

It's a lightweight browser extension that supports all common browsers across Windows, macOS, and Linux, with deployment on iOS and Android as well. 

Indeed, reading through some of the customer feedback on the Gartner Peer Insights™ website, the recurring theme in customer feedback is breadth of coverage, and that follows directly from the architecture and capabilities of Workforce Protector. 

Workforce Protector provides coverage across situations in which security teams normally lose the thread: contractors on their own laptops, employees checking a SaaS app from a personal phone, new hires using an unmanaged device two weeks during an acquisition. Managed or unmanaged, any browser, any operating system — the visibility and enforcement travel with the user.

Reviewers tend to describe this kind of protection as filling gaps their existing stack couldn’t. For example, an IT manager for a large healthcare and biotech organization said that “LayerX [now Akamai Workforce Protector] gave us another level of control that our existing DLP, endpoint security, and other Zero Trust tools couldn't. We were having difficulty managing things like browser extensions, use of personal SaaS accounts on work computers, and granular access policies. Implementing LayerX was like Christmas morning for security minded teams. On top of that, their account reps and support are all extremely nice and responsive." (LayerX was renamed Akamai Workforce Protector as of August 5, 2026.)

Another IT manager at a services firm, using the product as an AI usage control solution, explained: “We initially adopted LayerX for extension management, but it quickly proved valuable across several other areas — especially in providing visibility and control over GenAI usage. It has been instrumental in protecting our critical client data from being exposed to the GenAI platforms.”

The other consistent thread in the reviews is how little disruption the rollout of Workforce Protector caused — and this is the part we’d encourage security leaders to weigh carefully when evaluating the category.

A full enterprise browser asks your workforce to abandon the browser they use all day and adopt a new one, with a new interface, new habits, and new friction in workflows that were previously fine. Knowledge workers, developers, and anyone moving across a dozen applications an hour all tend to resist that change, and their resistance is rational. 

The predictable outcome is partial deployment: The security team sees the compliant half of the organization and loses visibility into the half that found a work-around. Partial coverage is a difficult thing to build a control strategy on.

We’re proud to be recognized in this report, and thrilled that the recognition comes from the people running the product every day. 

But don’t just take our word for it; if you're evaluating where browser-layer security fits into your AI governance and SaaS strategy, the fastest way to judge any product is to see what it surfaces in your own environment.