Reflecting On Gartner’s 2025 NDR Magic Quadrant: Our Commitment to Innovation and Customer Success

By Gareth Maclachlan and Tom Stitt · May 30, 2025

We're honored that Gartner has recognized Trellix amongst only 10 other vendors featured in the 2025 Magic Quadrant for Network Detection and Response—a group chosen from dozens of solutions competing in this rapidly expanding market. This recognition validates not only our current NDR capabilities, but also our unique heritage of delivering battle-tested network security solutions to enterprise and government customers worldwide for over two decades.

Unlike many vendors who evolved into NDR from network monitoring backgrounds, Trellix brings a proven security operations foundation to this market. Our network security solutions have been tested against sophisticated nation-state attacks and advanced persistent threats, protecting approximately 1,700 enterprise and government customers across architecturally complex, hybrid environments spanning both IT and OT infrastructure.

These customers include large enterprises with sophisticated threat landscapes and government organizations across multiple countries who demand the highest levels of security assurance. This proven track record in protecting critical infrastructure and high-value targets provides the security operations expertise that smaller, monitoring-focused vendors cannot match.

The NDR market continues to evolve rapidly, driven by expanding attack surfaces, sophisticated threats, and overwhelmed security teams. As we reflect on Gartner's assessment, we see opportunities to clarify misconceptions, share our innovation story, and reinforce our commitment to customer success.

Our Perspective on the Gartner NDR MQ

While we deeply respect Gartner's analytical expertise, we believe some characterizations in this year's report don't fully capture the breadth and sophistication of our Trellix NDR solution. In the spirit of constructive dialogue, we'd like to address several key areas where a deeper look tells a more complete story.

Beyond IDPS: A Comprehensive, Multi-Layered Detection solution

Gartner's characterization of Trellix NDR as "Its NDR product builds on its successful IDS detections, adding AI behavioral detections to generate alerts.” (Gartner, Inc) does nod to Trellix’s threat detection heritage, however, significantly understates our capabilities. Trellix NDR is a comprehensive, multi-layered detection solution built on foundational Trellix (FireEye) NX technology that combines signature-based, heuristic, behavioral analytics, dynamic file analysis (sandboxing), machine learning detection, and GenAI technologies—not simply an IDS with NDR enrichment. This foundation provides the battle-tested detection capabilities that existing customers trust while extending into advanced network behavioral and ML detection and response capabilities.

What truly sets us apart is our "Active NDR" approach: unlike competitors that require continuous tuning for false positive and third-party integrations for threat prevention, Trellix NDR uniquely combines comprehensive detection with prevention capabilities in a single solution. This integrated approach eliminates security stack complexity while providing immediate inline threat blocking—a capability that most NDR vendors simply cannot match without external dependencies and complexity.

Our multi-layered detection approach delivers superior threat detection efficacy compared to pure anomaly-based NDR solutions that often overwhelm analysts with false positives. As a provider of active blocking for threat detection, Trellix NDR strives for a high level of efficacy, since the consequences of a false positive can be catastrophic. By combining behavioral analytics with signature-based detection, threat intelligence, and comprehensive MITRE ATT&CK® framework mapping, we provide high-confidence alerts with clear context about attack progression. This intelligence-driven approach enables our customers to focus on genuine threats rather than chasing anomalies that may represent normal business activity, directly addressing the alert fatigue that plagues security operations relying solely on behavioral detection methods.

Innovation Leadership, Not Market Following

The assessment that "Many recent product updates have delivered features that are common to the market. Customers may find that the Trellix product does not deliver features that are ahead of the market.” (Gartner, Inc) overlooks several areas where Trellix leads rather than follows. While competitors are still planning GenAI features to reduce the noise from false positives, we've already deployed production-ready AI capabilities through Trellix Wise, providing automated investigation, triage assistance, and remediation recommendations to customers today. There are several other recent innovations covered in our Trellix NDR Innovations Blog.

Our innovation timeline speaks for itself: SmartVision technology launched in 2018 for high-fidelity detections mapped to specific MITRE techniques, earning recognition including the NAVWAR first place award. We've pioneered advanced attack path discovery capabilities that identify potential lateral movement routes before attackers can exploit them. Our sophisticated encrypted traffic analysis detects threats in encrypted flows without decryption—critical as 95% of web traffic is now encrypted1—while competitors struggle with this blind spot.

Hybrid Infrastructure Strategy: Purposeful, Not Limited

Gartner notes our lack of SaaS offerings as limiting our addressable market. While we acknowledge the growing SaaS trend, our architectural approach is strategically purposeful rather than simply limited. Not all organizations are moving to the cloud; many, especially in regulated industries such as government, finance, and healthcare, face stringent data sovereignty and compliance requirements that often preclude SaaS deployments. Our on-premises and hybrid deployment model is specifically tailored to meet these complex needs, accommodating the architectural intricacies of hybrid environments that many of our clients navigate. This strategy ensures that we can effectively serve organizations that demand robust, compliant solutions rather than solely following industry trends.

More importantly, we effectively address hybrid infrastructure needs through flexible deployment options, including virtual sensors for cloud VPC monitoring across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Our NDR solution integrates directly with our Trellix Security Platform, enabling cloud-based investigation and correlation between NDR and our broader security controls. This approach provides the operational benefits of cloud integration while maintaining the security and compliance advantages that our core customer base requires.

Market Presence: Global Reach with Strategic Focus

While Gartner accurately notes our primary markets are North America and APAC, Trellix maintains a robust global presence with operations spanning North America, EMEA, APAC, and Latin America, serving customers across healthcare, manufacturing, retail, telecommunications, education, and other verticals beyond our traditional government and financial sector strength. Our customer base includes organizations of all sizes, from mid-market enterprises to Fortune 100 companies, supported by localized teams.

Learning From Gartner’s NDR MQ - Areas of Focus

While we've addressed areas where we respectfully add context to Gartner's assessment, we also recognize where their observations highlight important market dynamics and opportunities for Trellix to continue evolving.

Market Recognition: A Work in Progress

Gartner identifies that Trellix faces challenges with NDR market recognition compared to pure-play vendors, attributing this to ownership changes, integrations with other companies, and past company names. This is a fair assessment. The journey from FireEye and McAfee network security to the unified Trellix NDR solution represents our ongoing evolution as we integrate best-in-class capabilities under a unified solution, and we acknowledge that building clear brand recognition in the NDR space requires ongoing effort. It's important to note that our existing customers have remained with us throughout this transformation, demonstrating their confidence in our technology and roadmap as we continue to deliver enhanced capabilities that build on the proven foundations they already trust.

We're addressing this through focused customer engagement initiatives and broader market education efforts. Our continuous customer engagement includes the Trellix Thrive customer success program, our customer NDR Design Partner Program that drives product enhancements based on direct feedback, and regular Trellix Spotlight innovation update webinars that showcase our latest capabilities. Simultaneously, we're amplifying the unified Trellix brand through targeted marketing initiatives that clearly position our comprehensive NDR capabilities in the market. Additionally, we're executing targeted campaigns around AI-powered security and autonomous SOC capabilities. Our goal is to ensure that our proven technical capabilities are matched by clear market understanding of our NDR leadership position.

Customer-Centric Packaging and Pricing: Supporting The Security Journey

Gartner's recognition of our simplified packaging model reflects our commitment to listening to customer feedback and removing barriers to adoption. We understand that complex procurement processes can delay critical security implementations, so we've created packaging structures that meet customers where they are today while providing clear paths for growth over time. Our tiered packaging approach—Essentials, Core, and Enterprise—supports the security adoption journey, allowing organizations to start with foundational capabilities and expand as their needs evolve. This customer-centric approach to commercial models demonstrates our focus on making advanced NDR capabilities accessible to organizations regardless of their current security maturity level.

Our Vision and Momentum

Our customer outcomes and market momentum demonstrate innovation, value delivery, and strategic growth, positioning Trellix NDR for continued success.

Measurable Customer Impact

Organizations deploying Trellix NDR experience dramatic threat detection improvements, identifying sophisticated attacks in hours instead of days. Our risk-based aggregation framework reduces alert volume while ensuring no critical threats are missed. Trellix Wise cuts investigation time, enabling junior analysts to handle incidents previously requiring escalation.

Experience the Trellix NDR Difference

While analyst reports provide valuable guidance, direct experience best demonstrates Trellix NDR's capabilities. We invite security leaders to see firsthand how our risk-based prioritization cuts through alert noise, AI-powered investigation accelerates response, and integrated prevention provides immediate protection without tool complexity.

Our customers consistently report that Trellix NDR transforms security operations through dramatically improved efficiency, reduced analyst burden, and confidence in protecting critical assets. We remain committed to earning that confidence through continued innovation and unwavering focus on success.

Ready to explore how Trellix NDR can enhance your security operations?

Take the next step to learn more about Trellix NDR or contact your account manager to request a demo or contact us to speak to an expert.

¹Google Transparency Report, HTTPS Encryption on the Web, 2024

Citations:

Gartner, Inc. Magic Quadrant for Network Detection and Response. May 2025.

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