Top 5 NGFW solutions for 2025

Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) are essential in modern cybersecurity strategies. In 2024, the NGFW market experienced significant advancements as vendors innovated to address the escalating complexity of cyber threats.

Let's take a look at the upcoming trends for 2025 and what five important players in the NGFW industry did in 2024 to improve their solutions.

NGFW 2025 trends

In 2025, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are reshaping the capabilities of Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs). These technologies enable precise detection and blocking of zero-day threats, automating critical tasks like traffic analysis and anomaly detection. By leveraging AI and ML, organisations can proactively address cyber risks, staying ahead of evolving threats. The API-driven nature of modern-day firewalls enables teams to slash MTTRs, ensuring businesses are protected in real-time.

Cloud-native security remains a priority as organisations increasingly adopt multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud architectures. Modern NGFWs now offer advanced features such as dynamic policy enforcement, container security, and seamless integration with cloud-native constructs like Azure’s VWAN and Kubernetes (k8s). These capabilities ensure consistent and efficient protection across different and hybrid infrastructures. Additionally, scalable and flexible solutions provide a unified approach to securing both on-premises and cloud-based resources. Giving you back control over your data and access management, across the board.

Operational Technology (OT) security is also seeing a surge in NGFW innovations. Beyond hardware adaptations for rugged and industrial environments, NGFWs now support OT-specific use cases with advanced features like protocol inspection, behaviour-based threat detection, and micro-segmentation. These capabilities address the unique needs of critical industries like manufacturing, energy, and transportation, enabling organisations to protect industrial control systems (ICS) and prevent disruptions to essential operations.

IoT security is another critical area of focus. NGFWs are evolving to address the unique challenges posed by vast IoT ecosystems. Advanced features such as device visibility, micro-segmentation, and behavioural analytics help safeguard IoT endpoints against threats like botnets and DDoS attacks. With the integration of Zero Trust principles and encrypted traffic inspection, organisations can secure IoT deployments across industries with confidence.

Finally, user entity behaviour analytics (UEBA) is enhancing NGFW capabilities to detect insider threats and suspicious activity. By analysing behavioural patterns and flagging anomalies, NGFWs empower organisations to respond effectively to risks such as unauthorised data access or unusual user activity.

These advancements underscore the critical role of NGFWs in navigating an increasingly complex cybersecurity landscape. To stay ahead of evolving threats, organisations should prioritise solutions equipped with these cutting-edge features, ensuring comprehensive protection for 2025 and beyond. On top of new features, newer models also boast new processing architectures and optimised code bases, ensuring you don’t have to sacrifice speed for security anymore.

Next-Generation Firewall explained

Firewalls serve as a vital defence against a broad spectrum of cyber threats, including ransomware, viruses, worms, trojans, and adware. Next-Generation Firewalls elevate traditional firewall capabilities by not only identifying malware but also blocking it before it infiltrates the network. With advanced threat detection and response features, NGFWs deliver comprehensive protection across data centres, enterprise networks, and cloud environments, solidifying their role as a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity strategies.

To strengthen organisational security, regularly reviewing NGFW capabilities is essential. The escalating sophistication of cyberattacks is driving enterprises to adopt NGFWs, encouraging vendors to continuously innovate and enhance their offerings. Modern NGFWs feature critical capabilities such as application awareness, centralised management, and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). Additionally, many provide advanced functionality, including 100Gbps threat protection and hybrid cloud security, to address threats that bypass traditional perimeter defences.

By incorporating advanced threat prevention technologies, NGFWs equip IT security teams with the tools to defend against malware, intrusion attempts, and other sophisticated attacks. These enhanced capabilities make NGFWs an indispensable component of any organisation’s cybersecurity ecosystem.

Next-generation capabilities have been achieved by all solutions in the enterprise network firewall market, but vendors differentiate on feature strengths and depth. NGFW should be on every company's shortlist. - Mohamed El Haddouchi, Managing Director, Nomios Netherlands

NGFW solution features to look for

NGFW providers offer a variety of solutions designed to meet diverse organisational needs, including physical, virtual, and containerised firewalls.

• Physical firewalls are well-suited for organisations of all sizes, from small and mid-sized campuses to large enterprise data centres.
• Virtual firewalls are tailored for cloud environments like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and private clouds alike, offering the flexibility needed for cloud-based operations.
• Container firewalls cater to applications running in container environments, delivering enhanced visibility and protection in container runtimes and small form-factor deployments like docker-enabled infrastructure components.

Regardless of your infrastructure, there’s an NGFW solution designed to address your specific security requirements.

The best NGFWs come with advanced features such as Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS), web proxy and URL filtering, and Web Application Firewalling (WAF). They also support virtual deployments for cloud environments and can secure branch offices or single-enterprise networks with ease. These features are crucial for protecting against modern threats while enhancing application and network visibility.

When comparing NGFW solutions, key factors to consider include:

• Performance
• Third-party security integrations
• Ease of use
• Threat-blocking effectiveness
• Pricing and consumption models
• Additional features such as application visibility, hybrid cloud security, and centralised management.

By evaluating these factors, you can select the NGFW that best supports your organisation’s security goals and infrastructure requirements.

Here are our picks for the 5 best solutions for NGFW in 2025

Five NGFW solutions for 2025 are highlighted below, showcasing their unique strengths and why they stand out in today’s complex cybersecurity landscape.

Palo Alto Networks NGFW

Palo Alto Networks continues to lead the NGFW market, recognised as a Leader in Forrester's Q4 2024 Enterprise Firewalls Wave™. While Gartner's 2024 Magic Quadrant™ for Network Firewalls is yet to be released at the time of writing, Palo Alto’s decade-long tenure as a Leader highlights its consistent innovation and reliability.

Their NGFW portfolio includes physical (PA-series), virtualised (VM-series), and containerised (CN-series) firewalls, all based on a single-pass architecture that inspects all traffic—applications, threats, and content—while tying it to the user, regardless of location or device. With cloud identity engine integration and support for SaaS security through CASB, Palo Alto offers comprehensive protection for hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Palo Alto builds on its strengths with advanced AI and machine learning, delivering real-time protection against zero-day threats and ransomware. Their solutions extend to IoT and OT security with features like micro-segmentation, behavioural analytics, and device visibility. These innovations solidify Palo Alto’s role as a cornerstone for organisations adopting Zero Trust and hybrid cloud strategies.

Fortinet FortiGate

Fortinet's FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) are renowned for their high performance and comprehensive security features. Built on a unified operating system, FortiGate NGFWs provide consistent protection across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, effectively securing various network edges at any scale. They integrate advanced capabilities such as intrusion prevention, application control, and anti-malware, delivering end-to-end security through a single platform.

In 2024, Fortinet introduced the FortiGate 200G series, designed to enhance campus network security. Powered by the fifth-generation security processing unit (SP5), this series offers increased firewall throughput, AI-driven threat detection, and 5GE ports to support the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard. These features enable organizations to efficiently manage and secure growing volumes of data-rich traffic and cloud-based applications.

Additionally, Fortinet was recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Firewall Solutions, Q4 2024 report, underscoring its commitment to providing advanced networking and security capabilities through its FortiGate NGFW solutions.

Juniper Networks

The Juniper Networks firewall product line is the SRX series of NGFWs, which is available as hardware appliances (SRX), virtual appliances (vSRX), and containers (cSRX). vSRX can be hosted on the customer’s own hypervisor or run on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The Juniper Networks SRX Series NGFWs combine high-performance security with integrated services for application security, intrusion protection, and advanced threat detection for organisations of all sizes.

Juniper's NGFWs are recognised for their security effectiveness, achieving a 99.7% exploit block rate with zero false positives in the CyberRatings.org 2024 Cloud Network Firewall Report.

In 2024, Juniper Networks expanded its SRX Series NGFW portfolio with the SRX4300 and SRX4700 models, designed to meet the needs of mid-sized enterprises and large-scale networks, respectively. The SRX4300 is ideal for campuses and regional headquarters, offering high-performance security and advanced threat prevention. The SRX4700 is tailored for larger environments like data centres, delivering powerful protection for core and edge networks. Both models feature AI-Predictive Threat Prevention, zero-trust capabilities, and seamless integration with modern network architectures, reinforcing Juniper’s commitment to scalable and adaptable security solutions.

Cisco Secure Firewall

The Cisco Secure Firewall is a Next-Generation Firewall solution that integrates advanced threat protection, application visibility, and unified policy management. It provides uniform security across physical, virtual, and cloud environments, ensuring consistent protection and simplified operations.

Their firewall is recognised as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Firewall Solutions Q4 2024, delivers advanced, AI-driven security capabilities tailored to modern enterprise needs. With AI and machine learning powering automated policy management and encrypted traffic visibility, Cisco enables proactive defence against emerging threats. Its multi-layered inspection approach, including the SnortML engine, provides effective intrusion prevention, ensuring comprehensive security for diverse network architectures. These features position Cisco as a trusted partner for organisations seeking scalable and adaptive firewall solutions.

Forcepoint

Forcepoint’s network security portfolio includes seven different firewall series, with different purposes. All series include centralised management, and extensive security such as VPN, IPS, encrypted inspection, SD-WAN and mission-critical application proxies.

According to Forcepoint, their NGFW is designed to cut the complexity and time needed to get your network running smoothly and securely. And to keep it there. The Forcepoint Next-Gen Firewall is built around a unified software core that provides consistent capabilities, acceleration and centralised management across all types of deployments. Their Security Management Centre (SMC) can configure, monitor and update up to 2000 Forcepoint NGFW appliances – physical, virtual, and cloud – all from a single pane of glass.