The worldwide Network Security market reached nearly $8-billion in 2Q 2026, up 18% YoY – with firewall growth accelerating from 9% percent in 1Q 2026 to 18% in the second quarter as enterprises moved ahead with targeted lifecycle refreshes, capacity additions, branch modernisation, and virtual enforcement.
This is according to the latest report on the market from Dell’Oro Group, which says the broader market also strengthened as spending on data security and application front-door protection accelerated to support AI security initiatives, suggesting the quarter was broader than a hardware rebound.
“Firewall spending reaccelerated because customers had concrete reasons to modernise,” says Mauricio Sanchez, senior director, Enterprise Security and Networking at Dell’Oro Group. “Aging infrastructure, higher throughput requirements, branch redesigns, and expanding private-cloud workloads created multiple reasons to refresh or add capacity. This was a real modernisation cycle, but it was targeted rather than an estate-wide replacement wave.
“The broader Network Security result tells a second story,” Sanchez adds. “Due to the growing need to secure AI, enterprises are extending cloud-delivered security into sensitive-data controls while treating the application front door as a more strategic enforcement point for APIs, bots, and automated traffic. Those motions are expanding security spending beyond the firewall refresh and helping keep growth broad across the market.”
Additional highlights from the 2Q 2026 Network Security Quarterly Report include:
- Firewalls: Refresh and capacity expansion were broad enough to lift multiple suppliers and deployment models, although vendor execution remained uneven. Virtual enforcement and branch modernisation added to the opportunity.
- Web Application Firewalls (WAF): Demand continued to broaden from traditional Web protection toward APIs, bots, automated traffic, and application-front-door consolidation – strengthening the role of WAF as a control point rather than a standalone rule-set product.
- Application Delivery Controllers (ADC): Installed-base modernisation and capacity expansion improved the segment, led by F5’s BIG-IP migration cycle. The improvement remained concentrated, however, and should not be interpreted as a uniform recovery across suppliers.
- Security Service Edge (SSE) [Core]: Enterprises continued to expand cloud-delivered policy across users, devices, SaaS applications, and private applications reinforcing SSE as a central control point for distributed security.
- Security Service Edge (SSE) [Extended]: Data Security emerged as the clearest expansion layer as customers attached sensitive-data controls and AI-governance functions to existing SSE relationships, though vendors monetised those capabilities through different packaging models.