ADAPTURE Partner Cylance Among 2017 Gartner “Biggest Movers”

Adapture is an Authorized Cylance Partner Headquartered in Atlanta

In this series, we will be highlighting those elite companies that have made it into the coveted quadrants of Gartner’s playing field, starting with the Endpoint Security market. But first, let’s lay some groundwork.

When Gartner highlights you in a “Magic Quadrant,” you know that you’re one of the bigger industry players. Companies invest many hours and company resources to be on Gartner’s radar, even after they’re chosen for inclusion. Those little blue dots may appear small on the page, but each dot represents a massive effort. As an authorized Atlanta Cylance partner, we wanted to share our insight into why Cylance made such a big jump in the 2017 Magic Quadrant.

See our other MQ discussions on ADC, Integrated Systems, Enterprise Network Firewalls, IaaS, SIEM, SSA, IPS, and WAF.

Ask a Partner: What’s a Magic Quadrant?

As a quick reminder, the Gartner Magic Quadrant is a visual aid that charts the yearly maturation progress of markets and their vendors. Starting at the bottom left and moving clockwise, the four quadrants consist of Niche Players, Visionaries, Challengers, and Leaders. If a company is moved to the right across the chart, it has demonstrated a greater “completeness of vision.” If they are moved upward, it has a greater “ability to execute.” Each of the four quadrants is its own form of accomplishment, but the Leaders realm is, naturally, the most coveted position.

The “magic” in Gartner’s title belies the stringent methodologies and focused analysis that Gartner uses to determine the “most important or best-suited” corporations within a particular market boundary. In short, Gartner searches for companies that excel within certain inclusion criteria: “market share, revenue, number of clients, types of products or services, target market, and other defining characteristics.” Admittedly, this summary barely scratches the surface of the intricacies involved in their analyses, so you can learn more about how Gartner evaluates companies here.

Now, with some of the background for this series out of the way, let’s share more of our expertise as a Cylance partner and move into the Gartner EndPoint Protection (EPP) Magic Quadrant.

Biggest Mover: Cylance—Cybersecurity that Predicts, Prevents, and Protects

Cybersecurity firm Cylance uses lightweight artificial intelligence (instead of heavy signatures) to provide customers with security that “predicts, prevents, and protects.” A relative newcomer, Cylance was founded in 2012, but it only took them a few years to catch Gartner’s attention. Since 2016, Gartner has placed Cylance squarely with the Visionaries in the Endpoint Security realm.

Recently, they have made a move from the mid-lower right of the Visionaries quadrant in 2016—with four competitors above them—to the very top of that quadrant in 2017, with no competitors close by or above. How did Cylance manage such a significant leap?

Moving in the Wrong Direction

Naturally, part of Cylance’s dramatic forward movement was due to competitors—namely Intel, Eset, and Webroot—taking a gradual back seat within their quadrants.

Intel, which was in a top position in the Leaders quadrant from 2014 to 2016, dropped entirely out and to the left, into the Challengers quadrant, for 2017. Gartner reports that the company’s recent liquidation of McAfee into Intel has engendered a “lack of focus and direction” due to the “significant exodus of McAfee critical talent.” Compounding this loss, much of McAfee’s talent migrated to local competitors in the wake of the takeover.

From 2016 to 2017, Eset moved down from the very top of the Visionaries quadrant into the Niche Players quadrant. Eset’s inability to keep up with the pack is partially is due to the fact that they have yet to implement a cloud-based management console for clients. Not only this, Eset’s current management dashboards “do not provide any vulnerability or configuration data to aid in security state assessments.”

Webroot, which has been a strong contender in the Visionaries quadrant for several years now, found itself falling back into the Niche Players quadrant by 2017. Gartner reported that Webroot is inflexible and narrow in its service offerings: because Webroot is primarily an anti-malware utility, it does not provide port/device control or vulnerability and patch management, essentially making it “not appropriate for all client environments.”

While competitor regression is not the main reason why Cylance has forged so far ahead, it is always helpful—no matter how strong of a contender you may be—to have competitors lose significant ground within the market.

But, let’s take a closer look at all that Cylance has been doing right.

Why is Cylance Moving?

According to Gartner’s 2017 report, Cylance is “by far the fastest-growing EPP vendor” in the market. This is due in great part to its 2016 implementation of CylanceProtect with OPTICS, an endpoint detection and response solution that enables users to “see” the root cause of attacks. With the new OPTICS system, Cylance also released a powerful cocktail of updated support for scripted control, memory protection, and application and device control features.

Gartner also praises OPTICS as a highly versatile system that can seamlessly operate on premise or can be cloud-enabled. We should clarify that Cylance uses cloud management; it is not cloud-based. Data stays in-house—there is no need to exfiltrate data to cloud when detection can happen locally, making OPTICS a prime solution for companies with highly sensitive data and files (HIPAA compliance anyone?). Don’t just take our word for it: as reported by Gartner, Cylance customers related that OPTICS had “easy deployment and management, low performance impact, and high-execution detection rates against new threat variants.” That is high praise!

All tech talk aside, Gartner made it abundantly clear that Cylance has and will continue to cover a lot of ground in the playing fields of Endpoint Security. At this rate of advancement, Cylance’s next stop will be the Leaders Quadrant, and we couldn’t be prouder to partner with them.

Stay tuned for the next blog installment as we uncover the movers and leaders in another one of Gartner’s Magic Quadrants.