Gartner has announced the 2018 Peer Insights Customers' Choice for Enterprise Network Firewall, and Data Center Backup and Recovery Software.

This is a recognition of vendors in their market by verified end-user professionals who have experience purchasing, implementing and/or using the enterprise solution, which takes into account both the number of end-user reviews and the overall user ratings.

• Cisco
• Fortinet
• Palo Alto Networks

• Actifio
• Cohesity
• Commvault
• SEP
• Unitrends
• Veeam

"Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice is designed to help IT professionals make better purchase decisions by leveraging the knowledge and feedback by fellow verified end users," said Gartner executive VP of products and services Ken Davis.

"We work hard to ensure that all of the reviews are submitted by an IT professional or business user who has had experience purchasing, implementing and/or using the enterprise solution they are reviewing - free from conflicts of interest."

The enterprise network firewall market is primarily composed of purpose-built appliances for securing enterprise corporate networks.

The data center, backup and recovery software market is focused on providing backup capabilities for the upper-end mid-market and large-enterprise environments, in which Cohesity earned the highest overall rating of 4.8 of 5 stars for their hyperconverged secondary storage offerings.

“We believe that receiving the ‘2018 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for Data Center Backup and Recovery Software' distinction validates that we are successfully delivering on our mission,” said Cohesity chief marketing officer Lynn Lucas.

“To us, the reviews provide evidence that our web-scale, hyperconverged secondary storage solution helps enterprises simplify and extract new value from backup and recovery.

Only seven vendors in a market are selected for this recognition.

To be eligible they must meet a certain set of criteria including 50 or more published reviews and an average overall rating of 4.200 stars or greater in the 12 months before the eligibility cutoff date.

The vendors must also have at least one product designated by Gartner research analysts as relevant to the market and vendors with excessive concentrations from a specific geographic region, industry or non-enterprise users are not considered.

Reviews published must first pass Gartner Peer Insights' validation, conflict of interest and moderation process.