Why Frost & Sullivan Ranked Palo Alto Networks #1 in Healthcare Innovation and Growth
The devices that keep patients alive are the ones you can't patch on a Tuesday night. An infusion pump running a decade-old OS, a patient’s vital signs monitor mid-shift, an imaging system that needs FDA revalidation before a single line of firmware changes — these are the assets attackers now count on, and the assets a maintenance window can't reach. Ransomware doesn't wait for your change-control board. When it reaches clinical infrastructure, the outcome isn't a data-loss headline; it's diverted ambulances and delayed care.
Regulators have noticed. FDA device cybersecurity guidance, the proposed HIPAA Security Rule update, EU MDR, and emerging AI governance requirements are converging into a compliance posture with no discretionary timeline — elevating cybersecurity from an IT budget line to a board-level obligation with a deadline attached.
Closing that gap between knowing a device is vulnerable and doing something about it without touching the device is the problem we set out to solve. It's also the reason Frost & Sullivan named Palo Alto Networks a Visionary Leader in its Frost Radar™: Healthcare Infrastructure Cybersecurity in the United States, 2026 — and positioned us further into the upper-right than any other provider evaluated, with the top Innovation Index score in the study (5.00) alongside a Growth Index score of 4.60.
"Palo Alto Networks is the Frost Radar™ Growth and Innovation Index leader. Its broad platform combines healthcare-specific device intelligence and virtual patching with network, cloud, identity, application, and AI security … while leveraging an extensive healthcare customer base."
— Frost & Sullivan
Fifteen providers were selected from more than 50 qualified participants, and only one led on both the Growth and Innovation axes. Here's what that position rests on.
From visibility to enforcement — without modifying the clinical asset
Most medical-device security stops at a dashboard. It tells you what you have and what's wrong with it, then hands the problem to a human who has to translate that finding into a firewall rule or a maintenance ticket. That translation step is where exposure lives.
Frost & Sullivan singled out Palo Alto Networks for moving past it. Device Security — evolved from our Zingbox-based Medical IoT origins — uses the next-generation firewall you likely already run as both the sensor that identifies a vulnerable device and the enforcement point that blocks the exploit against it. Guided virtual patching lets you protect a device that can't be conventionally patched — legacy OS, zero-downtime requirement, or pending FDA revalidation — and compresses remediation from months to minutes without modifying the clinical asset itself.
Frost & Sullivan called this our defining advantage:
"Rather than competing only as a medical device discovery vendor, Palo Alto Networks differentiates itself by moving directly from identifying risk to applying compensating controls through existing network infrastructure. This is especially valuable for legacy and difficult-to-patch clinical devices, where traditional remediation may be delayed by FDA revalidation requirements, uptime constraints, or operational complexity."
— Frost & Sullivan
What it means for you: the unpatchable-device problem stops being a standing risk you document and start being one you can actually contain, on infrastructure that's already deployed.
Signal instead of alert fatigue
Every security team in a health system is drowning in vulnerability findings and short on the people to work on them. Volume isn't the problem; relevance is.
The report credited how we cut through that volume. Device Security builds a correlated inventory carrying more than 3,800 identity and security attributes per asset — including clinical integrations such as Philips Focal Point and GE CARESCAPE — then layers vulnerability intelligence, active-exploitation data, network exposure, clinical criticality, and compensating controls to cut vulnerability noise by as much as 90%. MITRE ATT&CK mappings and out-of-the-box HIPAA and NIST CSF compliance dashboards come standard.
What it means for you: your team spends its limited hours on the single high-likelihood risk sitting on a choke-point device, not on hundreds of findings that will never be reached — and prioritization reflects patient impact, not just CVSS.
Built on a scale that keeps pace with the threat
Healthcare-specific capability only matters if it stays ahead of how attacks actually evolve. Frost & Sullivan noted that our "strongest innovation is now the integration of healthcare-specific security capabilities across a broader platform portfolio" — and tied that innovation profile to the scale behind it: threat intelligence from Unit 42, telemetry from more than 85,000 customers, 1.5 billion objects analyzed and 5 billion events processed daily, and behavioral baselines drawn from over 17 million devices.
That scale lets protection extend beyond the medical device. Cortex XSIAM and AgentiX drive automated investigation and response, Cortex Xpanse surfaces exposed clinical assets and third-party connections, Cortex Cloud protects cloud-hosted workloads, and Prisma AIRS addresses the risks now arriving with clinical AI — shadow AI, model vulnerabilities, and PHI exposure.
What it means for you: the roadmap isn't a promise; it's fed by one of the largest threat data sets in the industry, and it reaches the newer parts of your attack surface as fast as they appear.
What the market is telling analysts
Recognition is one signal. Adoption is another. Frost & Sullivan reported that our healthcare cybersecurity business is growing at roughly five times the broader market rate, with Device Security posting triple-digit year-over-year growth. Notably, about 70% of that growth comes from expansion within existing accounts — health systems that started with network security and activated device, cloud, AI-driven security operations, secure remote access, and identity capabilities as their needs grew, rather than buying and standing up separate siloed tools.
For procurement teams where third-party attestation is a prerequisite, the report also notes FedRAMP Moderate/High, SOC 2 Type 2, IRAP, and C5 certifications.
That pairing — above-market growth with the study's top innovation score — is what set the Visionary leadership position apart. Frost & Sullivan called our progression "from visibility to proactive risk reduction" the company's most notable advancement: the shift from cataloging risk to actively eliminating it — at the network layer, which for legacy and difficult-to-patch clinical devices is the difference that shows up in whether care stays running.
The real question
Leading the Frost Radar on both growth and innovation validates an approach. But the question that matters in a hospital isn't where a vendor sits on a chart — it's whether a vulnerable, unpatchable device can be protected before an attacker reaches it, and whether care continues while you do it. That's the standard we're building to.
Read Frost & Sullivan's full Frost Radar™: Healthcare Infrastructure Cybersecurity in the United States, 2026 to see the complete analysis.
Frost Radar™ is a trademark of Frost & Sullivan. Findings and quotations attributed to Frost & Sullivan, Frost Radar™: Healthcare Infrastructure Cybersecurity in the United States, 2026.