I went to work for Forcepoint in 2020 and spent just a few weeks under 3 years there. I really liked the products and the people I worked with in the Technical Learning Services group. They were a smart, capable, and passionate bunch. I thought the company had a good vision for where it wanted to be in the market. I always had doubt about the company’s leadership’s ability to execute on that vision, though. That skepticism was repeatedly enforced by changes in senior leadership and sudden shifts in strategy. In fact, the month that I (and my manager and much of my team) were laid off, the very work I was doing was called out in a company meeting as essential to the company’s plans for the next year. I wasn’t called out by name, but the very specific training and enablement work I was doing and the work some of my teammates were doing was. In a short while, I went from “man, they really see how important this is to adoption” to “WTF?”. In the next year or so, many of the colleagues who hadn’t been laid off had left for competitors, both startups and established ones.

Every once in a while, I feel like taking a look at whether Forcepoint has been able to execute upon that vision or if it’s even a similar vision. Looking at where we are now, the contrast against the 2023–2024 period is stark. Back then, the industry was undergoing a massive consolidation. Analysts like Gartner were essentially forcing the market into the Single-Vendor SASE box. If you weren’t “converged,” you were legacy.

The 2023–2024 Hype Cycle vs. Reality

In 2023, the buzz was all about the “Death of the Point Product.” The 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Single-Vendor SASE had everyone scrambling to prove they could handle both the networking and the security in one go. At the time, Forcepoint was labeled a Visionary.

Checking back in now, I’m looking to see how they survived that transition. By the time the 2024 Gartner SASE analysis rolled around, the market began to consolidate around “Leaders” like Palo Alto and Zscaler, while Forcepoint shifted toward the Niche Player category. The analysts were right: having deep, complex DLP is great, but if the customer experience and adoption lag, it’s a hard climb against the platform giants.

Risk-Adaptive Protection in the Age of Agentic AI

In late 2023, the pitch was: “Trust the platform and its behavioral analytics to dynamically adjust the friction.” It could be a tough sell. Security teams were, and still are, notoriously allergic to “black box” automation that might block a valid transactions by important personnel or clients based on an “Indicator of Behavior.”

Fast forward to 2026. The market has moved from simple human users to Agentic AI—autonomous bots moving data between SaaS apps without a human ever clicking “send.” This makes the 2023 versions of “User Behavior Analytics” look almost quaint. Forcepoint has pivoted to what they’re calling AI-native Data Security, integrating DSPM (Data Security Posture Management) to find “Dark Data” in AI pipelines.

I don’t have much doubt that they’re capable of delivering the product. I’m still skeptical about their ability to catch fire in the market. Do they know how to sell it? Do they know how to get the customers trained and supported after they do?

The Specialist’s Dilemma

The Forrester Wave™: Data Security Platforms, Q1 2023 highlighted a shift toward “holistic” data suites. Forcepoint was always a specialist here, but specialists often get eaten by generalists.

Checking the Forrester Wave™ for Q1 2025, they remain a Strong Performer, receiving top scores in Data Classification and DLP. Forrester’s note was telling: “Organizations requiring mature DLP… should consider Forcepoint.” It’s a polite way of saying they are still the best at the “old-school” heavy lifting, even if they aren’t leading the pack in the new platform-consolidated world.

I keep an eye on them mostly because I worked there and I really thought they were doing some cool things with the technology while I did. I am aware that they also represent a specific philosophy: that the data context may be the only thing that really matters. After all, what it is that bad actors are looking for when they breach an organization’s defenses? It’s data, whether they plan to use that data for nefarious purposes or they just want to hold it for ransom. Forcepoint’s platform matters and I sometimes wish I still had the insider view of it that I had when I worked there. Forcepoint’s current stance and position in the market is a litmus test for both whether a refined, data-centric approach can still win in a world where AI is just a new way to lose data and for whether that company’s leadership can articulate, sell the value of, and support that approach in a competitive market.