Check Point Software Technologies has been named a ‘leader' in Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant for unified threat management – the fifth consecutive leader ranking for the company.

Gartner recognised Check Point for its completeness of vision and ability to execute and says the leaders quadrant contains vendors at the forefront of making and selling UTM products which are built for midsize business requirements.

“The requirements necessary for leadership include a wide range of models to cover midsize business use cases, support for multiple features and a management and reporting capability that's designed for ease of use,” Gartner says.

The analyst firm says vendors in the quadrant lead the market in offering new safeguarding features and enabling customers to deploy them inexpensively without significantly affecting the end-user experience or increasing burdens.

“These vendors also have a good track record of avoiding vulnerabilities in their security products. Common characteristics include reliability, consistent throughput and products that are intuitive to manage and administer,” Gartner says.

Fortinet, and Sophos also made the leader quadrant in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for UTM, with Cisco, Dell and Juniper Networks classed as challengers.

Check Point also garnered itself leader status in Gartner's 2015 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls earlier this year, holding onto a position it has had since 1997.

The security vendor  is the only vendor to be named a leader in both the enterprise network firewalls and UTM Magic Quadrants, something the company says it believes reflects its ability to ‘bring the same enterprise security to any small or mid-sized business'.

Gabi Reish, Check Point Software Technologies vice president of product management, says business protection is needed now more than ever, as malicious threats continue to grow at accelerated rates.

“There are many reasons why SMBs are known to be a ‘sweet spot' for cybercriminals,” Reish says. “The lack of knowledge and resources make it challenging for some organisations to properly secure their networks,” he adds.

“Check Point is continuously innovating to match the evolving security needs of our customers, which is why we feel it's a privilege to be recognised for our platform security solutions from appliances to cloud based virtual firewalls,” Reish says.

Check Point recently announced SandBlast which combines CPU-level threat detection to uncover threats at the pre-infection level and threat extraction capability to safely deliver files.