Gartner 2022 Hype Cycle for Workload and Network Security
Notice: This blog post was originally published on Indeni before its acquisition by BlueCat.
The content reflects the expertise and perspectives of the Indeni team at the time of writing. While some references may be outdated, the insights remain valuable. For the latest updates and solutions, explore the rest of our blog
Gartner® recognizes Indeni as a sample vendor in the 2022 Hype Cycle™ for Workload and Network Security report.
We are excited to be included as 1 of 8 sample vendors worldwide for Network Security Policy Management (NSPM). We believe our inclusion is a recognition of our:
- Continuous network security risk analysis
- Vulnerability assessment
- Auditing capabilities
- Ability to reduce manual work through automation
- Reduced change of configuration mistakes
In addition to these capabilities, Indeni compliments NSPM tools beyond the primary use cases of managing firewall rules and auditing. The use cases are:
#1 Security Infrastructure Health Monitoring
Indeni on average has 60% more alerts than SNMP monitoring tools. This is the number one reason why organizations are migrating to Indeni. With Indeni, you don’t need to worry about letting problems escape you, or finding out about a service outage from a user.
While it is critical that you get notified of an outage, it is more important to quickly restore the service. Indeni offers detailed and actionable remediation steps to get you up and running quickly. These remediation steps are either directly from the vendor’s knowledge base or they are authored by real-world experience of certified network security professionals.
#2 Proactive Alerting
Many organizations are moving away from a classic model of reactive monitoring to proactive monitoring, which is a primary use case of Indeni. Many outages can be avoided if operations teams receive an advanced notice with respect to common issues stemming from hidden configuration skew, forgotten maintenance, or a combination of lack of adherence to vendor and industry best practices. For example, if your SSL certificate is about to expire, Indeni can notify you before an outage to a remote site. What if you enabled debugging on your firewall to troubleshoot a nasty problem, but you forgot to disable it. Indeni can immediately alert you avoiding a potential severe degradation of services.
#3 High Availability Readiness
Many outages can be traced to configuration not synchronized among the active, standby and backup firewalls in a clustered environment. Indeni continuously assesses devices in a cluster for inconsistencies. This includes security policies, forwarding tables, and many other configurations and state to ensure a seamless switchover.
#4 Critical External Services Monitoring
Ensuring a firewall is operating as intended requires more than just monitoring the device. Firewalls have dependency on many services; both internal and external. For example, a firewall requires continuous access to the on-premise Active Directory for identity awareness to make the forwarding decision. Firewalls depend on many external security services to get dynamic content updates for the latest threat intelligence. Indeni continuously assesses the availability of external services and ensures timely updates of content to protect your networks from threats.
Summary
To get the most out of your security infrastructure, you need more than a NSPM tool. Large enterprises typically use a NSPM tool to manage firewall rules, and Indeni for monitoring and automation.
The best way to learn more about Indeni is to try it out.
The article announces Indeni's inclusion as one of eight sample vendors for Network Security Policy Management (NSPM) in Gartner's 2022 Hype Cycle for Workload and Network Security report and explains how Indeni extends NSPM capabilities through continuous security risk analysis, vulnerability assessment, auditing, and automation to reduce configuration mistakes. It describes four primary operational use cases—security infrastructure health monitoring, proactive alerting, high availability readiness, and critical external services monitoring—highlighting how Indeni produces more actionable alerts than SNMP tools, provides remediation steps, detects configuration drift in clusters, and verifies dependencies like Active Directory and dynamic threat feeds. The outcome emphasized is improved uptime and faster recovery for large enterprises that pair NSPM tools for rule management with Indeni for monitoring and automation, and the article recommends trying Indeni to learn more.
What distinguishes Indeni from traditional SNMP monitoring tools according to the article?
According to the article, Indeni distinguishes itself by generating on average 60% more alerts than SNMP monitoring tools, which enables earlier detection of issues and reduces the chance of discovering problems via user complaints. Beyond alert volume, Indeni provides detailed, actionable remediation steps sourced from vendor knowledge bases and the experience of certified network security professionals, facilitating quicker service restoration. This combination of richer alerting and guided remediation is presented as the primary reason organizations migrate to Indeni for security infrastructure health monitoring.
How does Indeni support proactive alerting to prevent outages?
The article explains that Indeni enables proactive monitoring by detecting conditions that commonly lead to outages, such as hidden configuration skew, missed maintenance, or deviation from vendor and industry best practices. Examples include advance notification of expiring SSL certificates and immediate alerts if debugging is left enabled on a firewall, which could otherwise degrade service. By providing early warnings about these risk conditions, Indeni helps operations teams remediate issues before they escalate into outages.
In what ways does Indeni help ensure high availability and dependency readiness for firewalls?
Indeni continuously assesses clustered firewall environments to detect configuration inconsistencies between active, standby, and backup devices, covering elements like security policies and forwarding tables to promote seamless switchover. It also monitors critical external services that firewalls depend on—such as on-premises Active Directory for identity-aware forwarding and external dynamic content updates for threat intelligence—to ensure those dependencies remain available and up to date. These capabilities help prevent outages caused by unsynchronized configurations or unavailable external services and maintain protection against evolving threats.