Akamai has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026, recognizing Akamai Guardicore Segmentation. We see this as meaningful recognition of our approach to make the segmentation journey faster, simpler, and safer for all our customers.
As enterprise environments expand across hybrid, cloud, and on-premises architectures, the traditional network perimeter no longer offers sufficient protection. Modern threats move fast, and when AI-driven techniques are introduced, attacks can traverse internal networks in a matter of minutes.
This shift in the threat landscape isn't just theoretical; regulators are mandating immediate action. The European Central Bank (ECB) and the Joint Committee of ESAs (EBA, EIOPA, ESMA) explicitly called on CEOs and financial institutions to adapt to AI-enabled threats.
The European regulator stated that perimeter defenses will be breached, explicitly pointing to microsegmentation, Zero Trust architectures, and strict dependency isolation as non-negotiable controls to maintain operational resilience under DORA framework requirements. The goal is preventing single points of failure from turning into systemic crashes.
In this environment, microsegmentation has evolved from a specialized compliance project into a core foundation of Zero Trust architecture; and in an AI-accelerated threat landscape, security teams need the ability to isolate workloads, stop lateral movement, and contain breaches automatically.
Against this backdrop, we are pleased to have been named a Leader in Q3 2026.
In our opinion, this recognition reflects both our platform's technical strength, as well as the strength of our strategic approach. We believe this recognition also reflects the real-world validation of enterprise customers who trust Akamai Guardicore Segmentation to protect their most critical assets.
In its evaluation, Akamai received the highest score possible across 11 key criteria: Policy Administration, Administrative Experience, Asset Discovery, Flow Enrichment, Visualization, Public Cloud Networking Enforcement, ZTNA Integration, Exposure Reporting, Threat Detection and Response, Innovation, and Supporting Services and Offerings.
We believe a core driver of this performance is our focus on using AI to reduce administrative complexity. Akamai has made extensive investments into data research and AI to help our customers better manage the complete policy lifecycle — from initial discovery and policy creation to testing, enforcement, fine-tuning, and retirement — all from within a single interface.
As Forrester noted in the report, “Akamai is focusing its innovation efforts on creating an autonomous containment platform that requires less expertise, while improving the speed and accuracy of policy enforcement.”
In other words, we’re making segmentation faster, simpler, and safer.
The rapid adoption of AI has also altered the threat landscape. Automated, AI-powered attacks operate at speeds that manual security workflows cannot match. Containment must happen automatically, and it must be absolute.
When threats run at machine speed, waiting for network logs or SOC alerts is just documenting your own incident. Attacks coordinated by AI can pivot, escalate, and execute in milliseconds, rendering traditional perimeter monitoring uselessly slow. To stop an exploit operating on that timeline, you have to fight where execution actually happens: at the process level.
Real-time visibility into which processes are initiating connections, combined with automated control at that level, is crucial to understanding what is initiating a connection (human, or agent?), and terminating that connection before a small incident turns into a large problem.
As Forrester noted, “Organizations seeking deep process and network payload visibility or that require their microsegmentation control plane to be deployed on-premises should consider Akamai Technologies.”
Threat containment has shifted from being a routine SOC task to being a standing boardroom topic. When machine-speed threats pivot in milliseconds, containment requires predictive context, and security teams need help prioritizing which vulnerabilities are the most pressing ones to resolve. At the same time, leaders are now looking for clear metrics on response speed and operational exposure.
As the industry's only segmentation platform that actively quantifies blast radius using exposure data, we enable security teams to visualize an attack's potential reach and neutralize it from one unified interface — before damage cascades. We’re delivering the real-time control that security teams need to stop lateral movement, alongside the clean, quantifiable reporting required to prove exposure reduction and threat containment to the board.
Receiving 5/5 scores in both the Threat Detection and Response and Exposure Reporting criteria in this Forrester Wave evaluation is, for us, a testament to the effectiveness of our approach.
Although analyst evaluation provides essential technical validation, we believe a product's true testing happens in production environments.
Customer feedback in Akamai’s vendor profile cites several practical differentiators that matter most to operational teams, especially in proof of value conversations and live deployments:
Rapid agent deployment
Low resource overhead
Visibility provided
Technical support
In our opinion, being named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026, demonstrates that security teams do not have to choose between deep protection and operational simplicity. Our approach serves to make segmentation faster, simpler, and safer to operationalize, and our placement in this report is a testament to our approach.
We are grateful to our customers whose partnership and feedback continue to guide our product innovation.
To read the full evaluation and see why Forrester named Akamai a Leader, access your complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026. You can also speak with an Akamai security expert to explore how Akamai Guardicore Segmentation can secure your organization.
The Forrester Wave™: Microsegmentation Solutions, Q3 2026, Forrester Research, Inc., Q3 2026. The Forrester Wave™ is copyrighted by Forrester Research, Inc. Forrester and Forrester Wave™ are trademarks of Forrester Research, Inc.
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