3 Takeaways from the 2025 Gartner® Market Guide for Network Security Microsegmentation

More and more organizations are turning to microsegmentation to close critical gaps in their security and move closer to a Zero Trust architecture. It’s a technology that’s quickly gaining traction — and for good reason.  

As ransomware and other threats grow more sophisticated, microsegmentation gives security teams a way to stop attackers from moving freely inside the network.

Breaches are inevitable, and microsegmentation helps limit the damage. By creating granular zones across hybrid environments, it keeps threats from spreading, protects sensitive data, avoids costly fallout, and preserves your organization’s reputation.

The latest Gartner® Market Guide for Network Security Microsegmentation says that security and risk management (SRM) leaders should “build a microsegmentation architecture that restricts the lateral movement of malware in the network and in public and private cloud environments.”

Key insights from the Gartner Market Guide

Here are the key takeaways we think stood out most in the report:

1. By 2027, 25% of enterprises working toward Zero Trust architecture will use more than one deployment form of microsegmentation, which is up from less than 5% in 2025.

Why the shift? According to Gartner, “the evolving threat landscape resulting from digital transformation has prompted SRM leaders to focus on securing a growing number of increasingly fragmented perimeters.”  

Traditional tools still play an important role, but they often fall short when it comes to the deep, precise control needed to enforce Zero Trust.  

That’s where microsegmentation comes in.  

Gartner sees that SRM leaders have started seeking microsegmentation technologies in order to:

• Achieve fine-grained zoning: This approach provides a practical way to enforce zero-trust principles across public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

• Enable policies at the workload level: This approach will help to stop lateral movement and limit the blast radius of malware. This can be achieved by leveraging discovery features and integrating with cloud infrastructure automation to simplify initial setup and ongoing maintenance.

• Gain visibility of east-west network traffic and manage workload policies at scale: This involves identifying, managing and tracking changes in real time.

2. There is a growing interest in microsegmentation across every industry and region.

More organizations have shifted to hybrid environments to support today’s fast-moving, flexible workforces. This has made the threat of ransomware and other attacks universal.  

No business — no matter the size or industry — can afford to ignore it. That’s why it’s more important than ever to understand what microsegmentation options are out there and choose a solution that can scale with your needs.

This means vendors should be able to offer a clear, guided path to deployment. They should also show real ROI by helping organizations gain full visibility and control over their environments.

3. Looking ahead, Gartner expects microsegmentation vendors to go beyond their current offerings.

As organizations mature their Zero Trust architecture, they’ll need more than just basic segmentation. Longer-term, Gartner observes that microsegmentation vendors try to expand beyond the initial scope of segmentation assets within a data center by:

Adding remote access features like Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) that extend their scope beyond east-west traffic and inbound end-user traffic to the protected applications.

As Gartner notes, “in most cases, these new features are currently not being delivered through common control plane, or in Zero Trust terms, a common policy decision point.”

That could change in the future.

Gartner believes that “disparate policy enforcement points may become part of a larger cybersecurity mesh architecture, where common management and control planes orchestrate policy between federated policy enforcement points.”

What’s especially interesting is that many features not commonly available from microsegmentation solutions in the previous edition of this Market Guide have surfaced as common features in this latest version.  

Gartner sees these features providing a framework for the evolution of segmentation. This includes policy recommendation engines that use AI to streamline new policy rules suggestions in response to discovered flows. Gartner also adds “threat detection based on threat intelligence, Layer-7 protocol inspection, and anomaly detection” as common features for this market.

How Illumio is shaping the future of microsegmentation

At Illumio, we believe our breach containment platform — including Illumio Segmentation and our new AI-powered cloud detection and response (CDR) solution Illumio Insights — delivers on all the key capabilities and common features highlighted in the latest Gartner Market Guide.

As the market reaches a turning point, we're working closely with our customers and partners to understand how their security needs are evolving. That input drives the next generation of our platform.  

We’re not only working to build advanced tools to stop new and unknown threats. We’re also focused on making segmentation easier to build and manage for every organization.

Read the full Market Guide.

Ready to take the next step? Get in touch to see how Illumio can help you build a segmentation strategy.

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Gartner, Market Guide for Network Security Microsegmentation, Adam Hils, Rajpreet Kaur, Charanpal Bhogal, 6 May 2025

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