Global spending on network security products rose 18% year-on-year to nearly US$8 billion in the second quarter of 2026, driven by a jump in firewall refresh and capacity expansion, according to a report from market research firm Dell’Oro Group.
Dell’Oro said firewall revenue growth accelerated to 18% in Q2 2026 from 9% in Q1 2026, as organisations moved ahead with “targeted lifecycle refreshes, capacity additions, branch modernization, and virtual enforcement.” The firm said demand also strengthened across other segments, including data security and “application front-door protection,” which it linked to efforts to support AI security initiatives.
“Firewall spending reaccelerated because customers had concrete reasons to modernize,” said Mauricio Sanchez, Sr. 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 modernization cycle, but it was targeted rather than an estate-wide replacement wave.
“The broader Network Security result tells a second story. 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,” added Sanchez.
Dell’Oro’s report also points to divergent outcomes across product categories. For firewalls, it said refresh activity was broad enough to benefit multiple suppliers and deployment models, but noted “vendor execution remained uneven.” In web application firewalls, it said demand is expanding beyond traditional web protection to include APIs, bots and automated traffic, alongside consolidation at the application “front door.”
The firm said application delivery controllers improved on installed-base modernisation and capacity expansion, which it said was led by “F5’s BIG-IP migration cycle,” while cautioning the gains were concentrated rather than market-wide. It also reported continued growth in security service edge, with enterprises extending cloud-delivered policy across users, devices, SaaS applications and private applications, and identified data security as an “expansion layer” as organisations attach sensitive-data controls and AI-governance functions to existing SSE deployments.
Dell’Oro said its Network Security Report tracks manufacturers’ revenue across application delivery controllers, firewalls, SSE, traditional secure web gateway appliances, and web application firewalls, and further breaks SSE into “core” and “extended” functions.
