Enterprises’ Zero-Trust and cloud security enforcement drives hybrid mesh firewall and microsegmentation growth

As enterprises look to further secure their environments with zero-trust initiatives and adopt cloud-managed policy planes, this is creating a new growth opportunity for the hybrid Mesh Firewall (HMFW) Platform and Microsegmentation segment. 

According to Dell’Oro’s latest Hybrid Mesh Firewall and Microsegmentation report, the combined Hybrid Mesh Firewall (HMFW) Platform and Microsegmentation markets are projected to exceed $26 billion by 2029, representing what the research firm forecasts to be “a nearly 20 percent five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR).”

Offering improved operational consistency and compliance visibility, enterprises are advancing zero-trust initiatives by extending least-privilege controls into workloads and trust zones, while adopting cloud-managed policy planes that unify enforcement across physical, virtual, and cloud deployments.

“As enterprises continue on their zero-trust journey, they need to enforce segmentation and threat detection across users and workloads, whether on-premises, remote, or in the cloud,” said Mauricio Sanchez, senior director of enterprise Security and Networking at Dell’Oro Group.

New capabilities abound

Enterprises gain several benefits from HMFW and microsegmentation platforms.

Orchestrated through a vendor-operated, cloud-delivered control plane, the HMFW Platform market unifies firewall policy definition, threat prevention, and log visibility across physical appliances, virtual instances, container modules and firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) nodes.

The Microsegmentation market applies fine-grained, workload- and host-level security controls within and across networks, restricting lateral movement and serving as a core pillar of enterprise zero-trust architecture.

“HMFW Platform and Microsegmentation solutions are enabling distributed enforcement across hybrid environments, delivering unified visibility, faster policy execution, and the operational resilience that enterprises now demand,” added Sanchez.

Palo Alto, Broadcom dominate

While the growth physical firewall appliance market halted in 2025, Dell’Oro noted that the HMFW-related revenue in the SD-WAN and SSE (security service edge) markets exceeded 40 percent and 50 percent, respectively, during the second quarter.

Leading these market segments are Palo Alto Networks and Broadcom.

Palo Alto Networks was the top HMFW Platform vendor by revenue.

Network Security continues to account for over 75% of Palo Alto’s sales bookings. However, the company has continued to evolve the nature of this business and now over 60% of its Network Security bookings are driven by software form factors across SASE and virtual firewalls.

Broadcom was the number one Microsegmentation vendor by revenue. Microsegmentation is a key component of the company’s security and software offerings following its acquisition and integration of VMware and Symantec's enterprise security business. In its third-quarter fiscal year 2025, Broadcom reported total Infrastructure Software revenue was $6.8 billion.

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