Forrester names Microsoft a Leader in the 2025 Zero Trust Platforms Wave™ report
We are proud to share that Forrester has named Microsoft a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platforms, Q3 2025 report, ranking us highest in the strategy category.
With so many strong vendors and solutions in the Zero Trust space, you need solid data to make the right choice for your organization. That’s why Forrester’s analysis matters. They provide detailed comparisons of vendor capabilities and strategic vision, helping security leaders evaluate which platforms are best equipped to meet today’s evolving challenges.
Your decision matters now more than ever. The security landscape is evolving rapidly with the rise of generative and agentic AI—where intelligent agents can create and collaborate with other agents, collaborate autonomously, and scale faster than traditional models can keep up. Systems once built for human identities must now manage a growing web of machine identities, each with its own access and risk profile.
In this landscape, adhering to the principles of Zero Trust is critical for protecting sensitive resources, so you can:
- Expand visibility across your digital environment to reduce security vulnerabilities.
- Secure your most critical assets while ensuring compliance.
- Deploy generative AI with confidence.
Microsoft’s end-to-end, integrated approach to Zero Trust
The Forrester report cited our vision for proactive security architecture powered by innovative AI agents that automate complex security, IT, and productivity tasks. But what we believe really caught their attention was our integrated approach—how we bring together capabilities across security, compliance, identity, device management, and privacy, all informed by more than 84 trillion threat signals a day.1 As they noted, “Microsoft excels at tool consolidation and integration, helping reduce costs and overhead.”
Customers interviewed for the report recognized that our “deep cross-platform integration” delivers “real business value” without making customers stitch different solutions together manually. This integration spans the entire Microsoft Security portfolio—Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Sentinel, and Microsoft Entra—to provide a unified platform that secures identities, endpoints, data, apps, infrastructure, and AI. At the heart of this integration are the strong identity management capabilities of Microsoft Entra, which Forrester noted for “deliver[ing] effective least-privilege access enforcement” while enabling data security controls and endpoint management.
Picture a typical attack pattern. Malicious activity in an on-premises system might be detected by Defender for Identity, a compromised device flagged by Defender for Endpoint, and risky insider behavior identified by Purview. These signals converge in Entra conditional access, your centralized policy engine, enabling real-time, risk-based access controls that adapt to emerging threats and, when necessary, block access automatically.
Powered by AI and threat intelligence, our unified security platform surfaces high-priority incidents and recommends next actions, transforming security from a collection of tools into a cohesive defense. You can work within our unified platform to prevent, detect, and respond to incidents across a single integrated system—no jumping between dashboards or correlating signals manually. All of this comes together with Microsoft Security Exposure Management to give full visibility into all your assets and help you proactively reduce risk.
An integrated approach doesn’t mean using only Microsoft solutions. We believe security is a team sport. In fact, the Forrester report recognized the maturity and scale of our global partner ecosystem. We’ve invested heavily in these partnerships because they provide additional signals and specialized protections that make the entire security community stronger. The report also cited our standout community, which provides education, training, and guidance on building Zero Trust architectures to ensure customers have the support they need at every step.
Our commitment to customers and the industry
Through our Secure Future Initiative, we continuously evaluate and strengthen our own security posture, improve the security of our products to better protect customers, and share progress and learnings with the industry. We are also committed to standards, guidelines, and best practices from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), The Open Group, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and MITRE—not as compliance checkboxes, but because they provide proven frameworks and common vocabulary for implementing effective security.
Take action to improve your security posture
Threats are evolving faster than ever, but so are defenses. With the right Zero Trust security strategy, you can embrace AI’s transformative power while keeping your organization secure. Microsoft’s leadership in Zero Trust, as reflected for us in the latest Forrester Wave™, highlights our commitment to helping you meet these security demands.
For more information on this recognition, check out the full Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platforms, Q3 2025 report.
Ready to evaluate your Zero Trust readiness for the AI era? Start with our Zero Trust assessment, host an implementation workshop, or dive into our step-by-step implementation guides.
To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.
The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platforms, Q3 2025, Joshep Blankenship, Faith Born, and Peter Harrison. July 10, 2025.
Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here .
1Based on Microsoft internal data. Accurate as of July 2025.
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Source: Microsoft Security