Dell’Oro Group says global network security revenue rose 14% year-on-year to more than US$7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, as organisations increased spending on platforms designed to manage policy enforcement across distributed environments.
In a quarterly market report released June 9, the research firm said the stronger signal in the market was growth in “policy-plane” architectures intended to coordinate controls across users, applications, clouds, branches and customer-controlled environments. Dell’Oro linked the shift to increased focus on “agentic AI”, arguing security teams are being pushed to govern not only human users but also non-human actors, applications, APIs and distributed infrastructure through fewer policy planes.
“Physical firewalls and select point products are not going away, but the agentic AI era is raising the value of software and cloud-based network security platforms that reduce policy sprawl across users, applications, clouds, and branches,” said Mauricio Sanchez, senior director for enterprise security and networking at Dell’Oro Group.
Sanchez said Dell’Oro measured 22% growth for security service edge (SSE), 20% growth for web application firewalls (WAF), and 9% growth for firewalls, describing buyer interest in cloud-delivered access and “application front-door controls” alongside physical appliances.
Dell’Oro’s quarterly report covers vendor revenue across application delivery controllers (ADC), firewalls, SSE, traditional secure web gateway (SWG) appliances and WAF. The firm said it also breaks down SSE by functions including CASB, firewall-as-a-service, SWG and zero trust network access, and segments product form factors into physical, virtual and SaaS.
The data points to continued momentum behind cloud-delivered and virtualised security controls as enterprises attempt to apply consistent governance across hybrid and multi-cloud estates, including emerging AI-related usage. For security teams, the report suggests agentic AI is becoming a driver for consolidating policies and reducing fragmentation across tools and environments.
