I am incredibly proud to share that Palo Alto Networks has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms for the fourth consecutive year. For us, this recognition is a testament to our team's relentless vision as we continue to define endpoint defense—from the pioneer days of XDR to the new frontier of agentic AI.
We believe our repeated recognition as a Leader is built on a single, uncompromising commitment to our customers and partners: empowering organizations with reduced overhead, rapid threat response, a strengthened security posture, and the resilient protection required to close the most critical security gaps. We are now leading the shift into the agentic era. While AI agents significantly boost enterprise productivity, they also introduce novel attack surfaces that legacy EDR tools are unable to protect. As the pioneer of XDR, we are committed to defining the next generation of cybersecurity by securing this new frontier.
Cortex® XDR is helping customers:
Secure Agentic AI with Koi: Gain unprecedented visibility, guardrails, and control over AI agents and agentic tools before they become a liability.
Stop the Unseen: Leverage battle-tested prevention powered by behavioral analytics, and industry-leading automation and response.
Unify Your Defense: Consolidate your endpoint and workspace security with a proven, four-time industry Leader.
We are incredibly proud to be recognized as a Leader once again, an acknowledgement that belongs just as much to our customers and partners as it does to us. Your trust, feedback, and real-world challenges keep us sharp and dictate our roadmap. At the end of the day, our continued leadership is built on one core promise: make each day more secure than the day before.
To get the full story and a comprehensive analysis of the endpoint security market, I invite you to read the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant report.
Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms, By Deepak Mishra, Evgeny Mirolyubov, Nikul Patel, May 29, 2026
Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
The window for defense has collapsed, and most SOCs weren’t built for the speed of today’s attacks. According to the 2026 Unit 42® Global Incident Response Report, some end-to-end attacks now unfold in under an hour. Attacks that used to take days or weeks now happen in minutes.
Most traditional SOC models are trapped in a cycle of alert overload, fragmented tools and limited engineering capacity that slow investigations and delay response. Traditional SIEM and MDR models were designed to react to alerts. They were not designed to continuously improve detections, correlations and response with threats that move at machine speed. Over time, that gap between attacker speed and defender capability keeps widening, and it’s exactly why we built Unit 42 Managed XSIAM 2.0 (MSIAM).
Today marks the availability of the next evolution of our managed SOC offering – one that reflects how modern security operations must run in today’s threat landscape. MSIAM 2.0 is built on Cortex XSIAM®, Palo Alto Networks SOC transformation platform, and operated by Unit 42 analysts, threat hunters, responders and SOC engineers who handle the most complex incidents in the world. With this solution, Unit 42 provides organizations with a 24/7 managed SOC that delivers continuous detection, investigation and full-cycle remediation across the entire attack surface while improving operations over time.
We don’t just manage alerts. Unit 42 continuously engineers detections, correlations and response playbooks within XSIAM, refining them as attacker behavior evolves. This ongoing engineering ensures defenses improve over time, driven by real-world incidents and frontline threat intelligence, not static rules that quickly fall behind.
Why Managed XSIAM 2.0 Is Different
Elite SOC on Day One
We want SOC teams up and running as fast as possible. Experts lead onboarding, data mapping and configuration, and then your managed SOC team takes responsibility for operating and optimizing XSIAM on a day-to-day basis. The result is a SOC that improves over time without adding operational burden.
Every Threat Exposed
Unit 42 goes beyond reactive monitoring with continuous, proactive threat hunting across the entire attack surface. When a new threat is found in the wild, we produce threat impact reports that show how those techniques apply to each customer’s environment. We then translate those insights into custom detections and automated response actions, while also monitoring and investigating the correlation rules your team creates. Both the global threat intelligence and your unique use cases are backed by our 24/7 analysis, closing gaps quickly and strengthening defenses over time.
We also now support both native and third-party EDR telemetry, so organizations can benefit from Unit 42 expertise and Cortex® AI-driven analytics, regardless of the security technologies they use today. This enables customers to receive the strongest possible managed defense now, while creating a natural, low-friction path toward deeper platform consolidation as their environment evolves.
Machine-Speed Response
When incidents escalate, we don’t just hand you a ticket; we take ownership. Collaborating with your team, we establish pre-authorized workflows to execute immediate responses across your entire environment, from endpoints and firewalls to identity and cloud. We pair the platform’s native speed with expert oversight. By validating threat context and business impact, every response action is precise and safe, giving you the confidence to unleash full-cycle remediation. This allows MSIAM 2.0 to move seamlessly from detection to resolution with both velocity and precision.
And we stand behind our solution with a Breach Response Guarantee. If a complex incident strikes, you have the world’s best responders in your corner with up to 250 hours of Unit 42 Incident Response included. This built-in coverage removes the administrative hurdles of crisis response, enabling our experts to immediately transition from monitoring to deep forensic investigation and complete eradication, so you can focus on recovery.
Proven in the Real World with the Green Bay Packers
Working with Unit 42 and the Cortex XSIAM platform, the Green Bay Packers modernized their security across a complex hybrid environment, demonstrating what Unit 42's managed services deliver in real-world operations. By consolidating telemetry and accelerating investigation and response, they reduced response times from hours to minutes, investigated 54% more alerts and saved over 120 hours of analyst time without adding headcount.
These outcomes reflect the key benefits of MSIAM: Unit 42 experts working to apply frontline intelligence as new attacker behavior emerges, translating it into reporting and tailored detections that improve response where it matters most. When a machine-speed platform is operated by experts handling real incidents every day, defenses continuously strengthen as threats evolve.
The Future of the SOC
Unit 42 MSIAM 2.0 helps your SOC operate as it should by combining AI-driven analytics and automation with expert-led operations and engineering. This combination provides teams with the confidence that their defenses are always on, always improving and ready when it matters most. That’s the SOC that security leaders need today, and the one we’re building for tomorrow.
MSIAM is now delivered through two service tiers, Pro and Premium. Organizations can start where they are and grow at their own pace. Pro provides AI-driven managed SOC operations with continuous detection, investigation and response. Premium extends into full-lifecycle SOC engineering, with designated experts and customized detections, automation and tailored response playbooks as your security maturity grows.
To learn more about Managed XSIAM 2.0, join us at Symphony 2026, a Palo Alto Networks premier virtual SOC event, where Unit 42 and Cortex® experts will share frontline threat intelligence from the new 2026 Unit 42 Incident Response Report alongside real-world SOC transformation insights from organizations operating at machine speed.
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for Endpoint Protection Platforms for the fourth consecutive year. For us, this recognition is a testament to our team's relentless vision as we continue to define endpoint defense—from the pioneer days of XDR to the new frontier of agentic AI.
