Global distributor Westcon-Comstor Sub-Saharan Africa is backing its vendor partner Palo Alto to lead in the roll out of next-generation firewall solutions as research predicts explosive growth in the international network security firewall market.

The distributor company references research by Technavio which states that the global network security firewall market size is expected to grow by US$3.04-billion from 2021-2026.

This explosive growth is driven partly by the adoption of cloud technologies and fuelled by the increased use of devices "outside the firewall" in a hybrid work model.

Rentia Booysen, Westcon Director, Westcon-Comstor.

Rentia Booysen, Westcon Director, Westcon-Comstor, says, “As Africa faces an ongoing security skills shortage, solutions such as Palo Alto take the guesswork out of security, helping end users get ahead of attackers. This, coupled with its use of AI and its Zero Trust approach, is putting a new name to real-time security."

In a recent announcement, Palo Alto Networks stated that it was among the ten select vendors that Forrester evaluated for its Q4 2022 Enterprise Firewalls report and received the highest scores in both the Current Offering and Strategy categories.

According to the Forrester report: "Palo Alto Networks, long known as the inventors of the next-generation firewall (NGFW), demonstrate real innovation across multiple criteria in the network security space. The company's vision for network security is infused with AI and Zero Trust principles. The execution of both is impressive."

The report also notes: "Palo Alto Networks' new policy creation wizards use AIOps to continuously recommend best practices on any change, effectively providing real-time guardrails to the user. It would be difficult to overstate how much better this approach is vs. the competition."

Westcon-Comstor added that reseller partners can incorporate the full remit of Palo Alto solutions to their service offerings.