The network security industry topped $7 billion in 1Q 2026 as firms tried to stop AI agents making a mess.
According to beancounters at the Dell’Oro Group, the worldwide network security market hit more than $7 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up 14 per cent year on year.
Enterprises spent more on architectures that coordinate enforcement across users, applications, clouds, branches and customer-controlled environments.
Dell’Oro Group, enterprise security and networking senior director Mauricio Sanchez said the shift is getting urgent in the agentic AI era. Security teams now have to govern human users, 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.”
“SSE’s 22 per cent growth, WAF’s 20 per cent growth, and Firewalls’ nine per cent growth show that buyers are adding cloud-delivered access, application front-door controls, and virtual enforcement alongside the physical appliance base to get enterprises ready for the agentic AI era,” Sanchez added.
Physical firewalls were still useful for throughput, segmentation and local enforcement. The stronger architectural signal came from virtual and hybrid enforcement models that extend firewall policy across distributed environments.
Security Service Edge kept its place at the centre of policy-plane consolidation. Buyers wanted consistent controls across users, devices, SaaS applications, private applications and the new AI usage patterns now wandering through networks.
Application Delivery Controllers still mattered as application delivery modernisation rolled on. Agentic and AI-adjacent workflows increased the need for resilient application performance, automation and customer-controlled deployment options.
Web Application Firewalls gained more strategic value as enterprises tried to govern API exposure, bot activity, automated traffic and AI-adjacent application behaviour without slowing delivery.
