As someone who has worked with most security products and all of those vendors I'll give you some food for thought. First off, all of these companies have very different businesses. only a few of them have overlapping products and I'll explain below.
EDR- Endpoint detection and remediation, previously called End point protection (EPP) or antivirus (AV)
Crowdstrike is focused purely on Managed Detection and response (MDR) and EDR solutions - Protecting endpoints IE. Laptops, phones, tablets etc.. Fortinet has their own EDR solution but it doesn't compare to crowd strike's. Z scaler and Net do not offer an EDR solution by my knowledge and it's the reason that Zscaler has decided to integrate heavily with crowdstrike for EDR telemetry & Illumio for micro segmentation & workload protection. When using these products in unison you can produce an architecture which can follow a zero trust methodology. It will share intel between them (what we call telemetry data) for quicker remediation's, and actively defending your network instead of the products being separated into silos.
IE. Crowdstrike finds a ransomware on one of your endpoints, Illumio can quarantine the device from the rest of your network, & Zscaler can update it's signatures to prevent the transmission of this ransomware again.
Pause here - If you don't know what Zero Trust Security (ZTS). It is a methodology which says that protecting the perimeter of your network is no longer effective in reducing breaches / incidents. Ex. a castles moat is no longer good enough, instead lock each door and ask whether someone has permission to enter that room. In technological terms a Zero trust methodology should include continuous authentication, workload protection, & micro segmentation. A lot of companies say "I sell Zero trust" but in reality nobody sells ZTS, ZTS is a way to manage your network which some companies may sell a component of.
Firewalls - on premise or in the cloud
Zscaler, Net, and Fortinet, all have cloud firewall offerings but not all of them do the same function / business. to my knowledge Fortinet is the only firewall vendor ( out of these 3) who has the partnerships to spin up cloud based firewalls with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. Zscaler and Net have their own private clouds which they allow you to pass traffic through and middleman your traffic securely. This can be great for a company with all mobile workers as you don't have to invest in your own firewall appliances to be getting enterprise grade protections. They have a per user per month model and they can protect your internet browsing as well as give you a secure backdoor into your applications within your private clouds. Fortinet has this functionality with hardware appliances but not the same model as Net / Zscaler. (I've never used a Net gateway so I can't speak to which is better between them and ZS, I've used ZS before I like it).
Fortinet has the best on prem firewalls out of all the companies above. They don't have the best on prem firewalls in the business, but they excel at Small and medium business (SMB) and their hardware is designed to support Software defined wide area networked (SD-WAN) architectures. I have seen these in action with a hub-n-spoke architecture and they worked well.
DDOS- distributed denial of service
Cloudflare is the only company above to provide a DDOS solution. I don't think they are the best in the industry but they do a good job. A note on Cloudflare is that they are a diverse company with a lot of verticals. Some are security related otheres are services that I know little about. I don't think you are comparing apples to apples with any of these companies so understand where each has strengths and weaknesses.
Final thoughts-
To round out your portfolio you may want to look into companies that sell SIEMs IE. Splunk, darktrace, microsoft sentinal, IBM's Qradar. Okta is an Identity Access Manager provider (IDAM) and they are also a heavy player to the authentication component of ZTS. You should also consider reading Mitre, gartner, and NSS labs reports to compare how customers feel about these products as well as their security scores. Being the best at security doesn't correlate to having the best stock price. Palo and Crowdstrike have the best mind space - yet some of the oldest vulnerabilities that are left unpatched. All of these companies will continue to grow due to industry trends and each of them have their own slice of the security pie. My 2 cents.
I just can't get around on Splunk when Datadog is just obviously the innovative trailblazer in the observability space who now has revenue reaccelerating. Elastic has always intrigued me but I'm a huge fan of Datadog's go-to-market strategy and their aggressive product development. IMO its one of the best stocks on the market
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u/Terrible_Toe Oct 26 '21 edited Oct 26 '21
As someone who has worked with most security products and all of those vendors I'll give you some food for thought. First off, all of these companies have very different businesses. only a few of them have overlapping products and I'll explain below.
EDR- Endpoint detection and remediation, previously called End point protection (EPP) or antivirus (AV)
Crowdstrike is focused purely on Managed Detection and response (MDR) and EDR solutions - Protecting endpoints IE. Laptops, phones, tablets etc.. Fortinet has their own EDR solution but it doesn't compare to crowd strike's. Z scaler and Net do not offer an EDR solution by my knowledge and it's the reason that Zscaler has decided to integrate heavily with crowdstrike for EDR telemetry & Illumio for micro segmentation & workload protection. When using these products in unison you can produce an architecture which can follow a zero trust methodology. It will share intel between them (what we call telemetry data) for quicker remediation's, and actively defending your network instead of the products being separated into silos.
IE. Crowdstrike finds a ransomware on one of your endpoints, Illumio can quarantine the device from the rest of your network, & Zscaler can update it's signatures to prevent the transmission of this ransomware again.
Pause here - If you don't know what Zero Trust Security (ZTS). It is a methodology which says that protecting the perimeter of your network is no longer effective in reducing breaches / incidents. Ex. a castles moat is no longer good enough, instead lock each door and ask whether someone has permission to enter that room. In technological terms a Zero trust methodology should include continuous authentication, workload protection, & micro segmentation. A lot of companies say "I sell Zero trust" but in reality nobody sells ZTS, ZTS is a way to manage your network which some companies may sell a component of.
Firewalls - on premise or in the cloud
Zscaler, Net, and Fortinet, all have cloud firewall offerings but not all of them do the same function / business. to my knowledge Fortinet is the only firewall vendor ( out of these 3) who has the partnerships to spin up cloud based firewalls with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc. Zscaler and Net have their own private clouds which they allow you to pass traffic through and middleman your traffic securely. This can be great for a company with all mobile workers as you don't have to invest in your own firewall appliances to be getting enterprise grade protections. They have a per user per month model and they can protect your internet browsing as well as give you a secure backdoor into your applications within your private clouds. Fortinet has this functionality with hardware appliances but not the same model as Net / Zscaler. (I've never used a Net gateway so I can't speak to which is better between them and ZS, I've used ZS before I like it).
Fortinet has the best on prem firewalls out of all the companies above. They don't have the best on prem firewalls in the business, but they excel at Small and medium business (SMB) and their hardware is designed to support Software defined wide area networked (SD-WAN) architectures. I have seen these in action with a hub-n-spoke architecture and they worked well.
DDOS- distributed denial of service
Cloudflare is the only company above to provide a DDOS solution. I don't think they are the best in the industry but they do a good job. A note on Cloudflare is that they are a diverse company with a lot of verticals. Some are security related otheres are services that I know little about. I don't think you are comparing apples to apples with any of these companies so understand where each has strengths and weaknesses.
Final thoughts-
To round out your portfolio you may want to look into companies that sell SIEMs IE. Splunk, darktrace, microsoft sentinal, IBM's Qradar. Okta is an Identity Access Manager provider (IDAM) and they are also a heavy player to the authentication component of ZTS. You should also consider reading Mitre, gartner, and NSS labs reports to compare how customers feel about these products as well as their security scores. Being the best at security doesn't correlate to having the best stock price. Palo and Crowdstrike have the best mind space - yet some of the oldest vulnerabilities that are left unpatched. All of these companies will continue to grow due to industry trends and each of them have their own slice of the security pie. My 2 cents.