Secure Web Gateway Market Trends for 2025: The Outlook to 2030

The secure web gateway market is anything but dead. Every major research firm that tracks it projects strong double-digit growth through the end of the decade. But the more interesting story isn't the size of the market. It's what buyers are actually paying for, and where they want inspection to happen.

Here is what the numbers say heading into 2027, the 2026 events that reshaped the vendor map, and what security leaders should do about it.

Secure web gateway market size: the numbers

Forecasts vary because firms define "secure web gateway" differently. Some count only standalone SWG; others fold in SWG revenue sold inside SSE and SASE bundles. Treat the figures as direction, not precision.

Two independent estimates landing around 22 percent annual growth is a reasonable signal that the category is expanding fast, whatever the exact dollar figure.

The SSE and SASE picture

Dell'Oro Group tracks SWG as part of Security Service Edge (SSE) and the broader SASE market, which gives a cleaner view of vendor revenue:

• SASE revenue grew 21 percent year over year in 1Q 2026, to over USD 3 billion. SSE grew faster, at 22 percent.
• Dell'Oro's August 2026 forecast projects SASE growing at a 15 percent CAGR to USD 24 billion in 2030, more than double 2025.
• Core SSE (CASB, FWaaS, SWG, and ZTNA) is forecast to exceed USD 13 billion in 2030.
• Separately sold data security and digital experience management are forecast to grow more than 20 percent a year, adding over USD 8 billion on top of core SSE.

The workforce behind the demand

Gallup's May 2026 data shows 52 percent of U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs work hybrid and 26 percent work exclusively remote. Only 22 percent are fully on-site. Every one of those laptops needs web security that works off the corporate network.

Trend 1: AI governance becomes a core SWG requirement

The biggest shift in 2026 wasn't a new protocol. It was a new question: who is using which AI tools, with which accounts, and what data is going into them?

Dell'Oro put it directly in June 2026: "AI is changing the SASE discussion from access and inspection to governance, data protection, and control over agents and machine traffic." It reported that SSE buyers are expanding into "SaaS control, data protection, AI usage governance, and agent policy."

For SWG buyers, that means three capabilities moved from nice-to-have to required: telling corporate AI accounts from personal ones, inspecting prompts and uploads for sensitive data, and seeing AI usage by user and app. Our AI governance framework breaks down how to set this up.

Trend 2: The vendor map got redrawn in 2026

Several events changed the shortlist that many teams will take into 2027:

• Cisco Umbrella is going end of sale. Cisco announced end of sale and end of life for Umbrella SIG and DNS on September 1, 2026, directing customers to Cisco Secure Access. Per Cisco's bulletin, the last order date is January 31, 2027, renewals run through January 31, 2028, and support ends January 31, 2029. That puts a large installed base into an active buying decision.
• Netskope went public. Netskope priced its Nasdaq IPO at USD 19 per share in September 2025, raising about USD 908 million.
• Lookout exited SSE. Fortra acquired Lookout's cloud security business, including its SSE product, in a deal announced in May 2025.
• Rebrands. Forcepoint renamed Forcepoint ONE to Data Security Cloud, and Cloudflare renamed its WARP business client the Cloudflare One Client.
• Analyst placements. Gartner published its 2026 Magic Quadrant for SSE on July 29, 2026. Zscaler and Netskope both announced Leader placements.

If you're an Umbrella customer weighing the move, see what Umbrella customers are migrating into and our honest comparison of Cisco Umbrella alternatives.

Trend 3: Buyers are questioning the backhaul

Most SWG revenue still flows to cloud-proxy architectures that route traffic through a vendor's points of presence. That model works best when users sit near those hubs. Hybrid work breaks that assumption. Cloud-proxy latency typically adds 40 to 80 ms near a point of presence and 150 to 400 ms when users are far from one.

A proxy in the path is also a shared dependency. On November 18, 2025, a configuration error crashed core proxy services at Cloudflare for several hours, disrupting services that depended on it. No network is immune to a bad day, which is why more buyers now ask what happens to enforcement when the vendor cloud is unreachable. We explore the cost side in how rising data center costs are driving SASE and SSE price increases.

Trend 4: Encryption keeps eroding network-layer visibility

DNS over HTTPS and Encrypted Client Hello hide DNS lookups and destination hostnames from network observers. Mozilla documents that ECH is disabled automatically when a transparent proxy is present and can be turned off by enterprise policy, which tells you how much network filtering depends on those signals. As more of the handshake gets encrypted, inspection has to happen either in a full proxy or on the device itself. More in Encrypted Client Hello and web filtering.

Trend 5: Data security is becoming the upsell

Dell'Oro's forecast separates "core" SSE from separately monetized data security and digital experience management, and expects the add-ons to grow faster. For buyers, that is a pricing signal: features like advanced DLP and data classification increasingly sit outside the base license. Ask every vendor what is in core and what costs extra before you compare quotes.

What an endpoint-native SWG looks like

The alternative to backhaul is moving the SWG onto the device. With dope.security, that looks like this:

• Local TLS inspection. Decryption happens on the device, so decrypted data does not travel to a third-party data center.
• No new hops. Requests that pass policy go straight to their destination, with up to 4x performance over legacy SWGs.
• Resilient by design. Policy lands in under a minute, and if the cloud console is unreachable, devices keep enforcing cached policies.
• Light footprint. Under 100 MB of RAM, on Mac and Windows.
• AI controls in the same agent. Cloud Application Control, AI Analytics, and Dopamine DLP, where text is extracted on the device and classified by an LLM with zero data retention.

It also deploys fast. A Fortune 100 company scaled dope.security from 900 devices to more than 18,000 in a matter of weeks, averaging about 3,000 devices a week. Read the Fortune 100 deployment story.

What security leaders should do in 2027

• Map your renewal dates. If you run Cisco Umbrella, plot your renewal against the January 2027 and January 2028 dates now, not in the final quarter.
• Measure the detour. Test page loads with your current SWG on and off from home and travel networks. If users feel it, they are finding ways around it.
• Test AI account control. Confirm your SWG can allow corporate ChatGPT and Claude tenants while blocking personal accounts, and catch sensitive data in prompts.
• Separate core from add-ons. Get line-item pricing for DLP, data classification, and experience monitoring.
• Pilot in parallel. Push an endpoint SWG silently to a small group through your MDM and compare results side by side. Our secure web gateway evaluation checklist has the questions to ask.

Frequently asked questions

How big is the secure web gateway market?

Estimates for 2026 range from about USD 18.8 billion (The Business Research Company) to USD 20.7 billion (Mordor Intelligence). Both project growth of roughly 22 percent a year through 2030 or 2031. Firms define the market differently, so exact figures vary.

Is the secure web gateway market growing or being replaced by SASE?

Both. SWG remains a core function, but more of it is now sold inside SSE and SASE platforms. Dell'Oro forecasts core SSE, which includes SWG, to exceed USD 13 billion in 2030.

What is driving SWG buying in 2027?

Hybrid and remote work, AI governance, data protection, and vendor churn, including Cisco Umbrella's end of sale. Buyers are also weighing whether to keep backhauling traffic to cloud proxies or move inspection onto the device.

What is an endpoint-native SWG?

An endpoint-native SWG runs the inspection engine on the laptop instead of in a vendor data center. Traffic goes direct to its destination after passing policy, and decrypted data stays on the device.

See the next generation of SWG

The market is growing. The architecture is changing. If you want to see inspection on the device instead of a detour through someone else's data center, start a free trial of dope.swg or book a 20-minute demo.