Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Symantec Data Center Security comparison

Akamai and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Akamai is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.0, while Broadcom is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.0. Akamai holds a 18.0% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Broadcom’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 83% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Read 20 Akamai Guardicore Segmentation reviews

7,992 Views
5,275 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

Symantec Data Center Security

Read 12 Symantec Data Center Security reviews

1,011 Views
687 Comparison Views

83% willing to recommend

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Symantec Data Center Security

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 14, 2024

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Symantec Data Center Security compete in the field of data center security, both offering distinct advantages. Akamai Guardicore appears to have the upper hand due to its advanced micro-segmentation, ease of deployment across various environments, and customer service adaptability.

Features: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides advanced micro-segmentation, broad visibility across data centers, and flexible policy management. It ensures quick compliance with auditing requirements and offers proactive threat detection. Symantec Data Center Security offers granular control with robust hardening of systems, providing unified security policy enforcement. It emphasizes precise access controls and comprehensive visibility across systems.

Room for Improvement: Akamai Guardicore faces challenges including high licensing costs, limited integration with major appliances, and a need for more flexible dashboards. Improvements in long-term policy management automation are also needed. Symantec requires simplification of its policy structures, increased flexibility and integration options, and better support for newer operating systems.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is versatile, supporting public, private, and hybrid cloud environments. Its technical support is known for quick adaptation and responsiveness. Symantec Data Center Security supports on-premises and private cloud setups, with robust technical support but could benefit from quicker response times and greater expertise.

Pricing and ROI: Guardicore offers flexible licensing scenarios, perceived as competitive despite high costs, demonstrating ROI through enhanced security and reduced resource needs. Symantec is acknowledged for higher costs but offers reasonable ROI according to some users. Guardicore shows potential for higher returns due to its adaptability in protecting diverse applications and systems.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Symantec Data Center Security Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Symantec Data Center Security

February 2026

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Helped 881,757 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (11th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (8th), Microsegmentation Software (3rd)

Symantec Data Center Security

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

10th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

4.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 18.0%, down from 25.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Data Center Security is 2.7%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	18.0%
Symantec Data Center Security	2.7%
Other	79.3%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Ken Bauer

Senior Security Analyst at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees

Segmentation of legacy systems has protected outdated endpoints and reduces network risk

The best features Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers make it simple to see all of the connections that are being made to each of the endpoints, and they can be controlled by process and port. The ability to control by process and port helps my team day-to-day because, since there are hundreds of thousands of connections to some of these endpoints, looking at the Reveal Map makes it simple to audit and create rules for what we want to allow. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has impacted my organization positively because we find it difficult to remove the legacy systems, so it was very important to segment them from the rest of the network to protect them and protect the rest of our network.

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Muhammad Ejaz ul Hassan

CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Continuous server hardening has protected critical legacy workloads and simplified security control

Symantec is lagging on the reporting side. I have been working for 10 years and I have identified many gray areas. As a user protecting your infrastructure, you need to sell the value to your management. Management buys the tool for preventing threats, and it works for them. However, you cannot sell it because every solution needs to show what happened in the last few years or how you will be protected in the future. Reporting is the most important thing for the CIO level, not the admin level. I have seen Symantec really lag in this area. I am creating my own tool to build a dashboard to share with the CIO level because they want to know what happened last week, last month, and last year. These reports will tell you about activities. Symantec changed the licensing when Broadcom acquired the company. The question of who will provide support became unclear. Support has now changed and they are making money. I have seen that most of the time when you ask implementation questions, they do not answer you. If you have a problem, they give you a low-level engineer at the first level. This delays resolution. Support has to be better.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."

"The tool is a complete package that offers many features like visibility. You can get a graph with real-time workflows and visibility into server-to-server communication. We get visibility into many things happening within our environment."

"This tool greatly helps in understanding the footprint of the attacks."

"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."

"The solution is very scalable, especially when connected to the cloud resources."

"Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see microsegmentation as distributed services."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has impacted my organization positively because we find it difficult to remove the legacy systems, so it was very important to segment them from the rest of the network to protect them and protect the rest of our network."

"The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pros

"The most valuable feature is the endpoint protection system."

"The tool will then detect any anomalies, such as an intruder who has breached the network, which can trigger the system lockdown feature if it's enabled and meets the defined threshold."

"Symantec Data Center Security, as a name, represents the perfect solution if you want to harden your servers."

"The console and tools are very user-friendly."

"The granularity of applying the policies is valuable."

"The ability to finely control permissions and restrictions on servers or assets through a customizable rule set is a key strength."

"Good file integrity monitoring features."

"The advantage of Data Center Security is its ease of use and that it serves as a single unified platform, where I can apply all my security policies to protect that server."

More Symantec Data Center Security pros

Cons

"The maps could go a bit faster. They are useful but slightly slow."

"I would rate the stability a six out of ten, where one is low and ten is high stability."

"They can maybe improve their customer service just because they are kind of a small organization, and customer service isn't as big as others such as VMware."

"Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation can be improved because keeping it up to date is difficult since it is SaaS-based and updates are not on a regular schedule; I have to reach out to my contact to ask them to update to a newer version, and it would be helpful if updates were on a regular cadence so that I would not have to remember to ask them."

"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."

"It would be very helpful for beginners if the solution had more windows to help with the terms inside instead of going to the documentation."

"Incident tagging could be improved. Other vendors offer semi-automatic tagging, which Guardicore doesn't yet have."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation cons

"Could have better reporting capabilities and better support."

"There is room for improvement in enhancing its graphical user interface for a more user-friendly experience."

"The support is very bad. They're not fast at all. Trend Micro's support is much better."

"There is plenty of room for improvement with this product, and it could start with platform metrics."

"This solution clashes with Microsoft defender, which results in performance degradation on the machine."

"A user or administrator making the policy in the DCS should have a very thorough knowledge of the operating system or policy making. You have to be very specific about the data structure."

"Agent management is a challenging task."

"They need to develop a more flexible product that can be scaled such that it fits well into a small business or a bigger, enterprise-level solution."

More Symantec Data Center Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."

"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."

"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."

"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."

"The customer would complain about the cost."

"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."

"The pricing is too high."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pricing and cost advice

"The product is a bit costly."

"It is notably more expensive when compared to other solutions."

"Compared to some other solutions, such as CrowdStrike, Symantec is more expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	5

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that overall everything worked out really well. The pricing was flexible, and it has worked out well with our budget.

See all answers

What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?

Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see mi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?

I believe Akamai Guardicore Segmentation could be improved with a feature to filter, and I believe implementing MFA would be very useful and helpful to us.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Symantec Data Center Security?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Symantec Data Center Security?

As a partner support, we handle all Symantec products for various clients. Currently, we work with DLP, Symantec Endpoint Protection, Data Loss Prevention, Data Center Security, Email Security, and...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Symantec Data Center Security?

I am still a Symantec partner. Price rating is five out of ten. Symantec Data Center Security is a perfect solution, but it needs to elaborate its functionalities and functions to the market. Peopl...

See all answers

Comparisons

Illumio vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 37% of the time

VMware NSX vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 10% of the time

Cisco Secure Workload vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 8% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Security vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 4% of the time

Zero Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 4% of the time

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Competitors

Trend Micro Deep Security vs Symantec Data Center Security

Compared 43% of the time

Symantec Endpoint Security vs Symantec Data Center Security

Compared 16% of the time

Trellix MOVE AntiVirus vs Symantec Data Center Security

Compared 10% of the time

Check Point CloudGuard CNAPP vs Symantec Data Center Security

Compared 9% of the time

More Symantec Data Center Security Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

February 2026

Download Akamai Guardicore Segmentation product report

Buyer's Guide

Symantec Data Center Security

January 2026

Download Symantec Data Center Security product report

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore

No data available

Overview

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a software-based microsegmentation solution that provides the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to enforce Zero Trust principles. It enables you to prevent malicious lateral movement in your network through precise segmentation policies, visuals of activity within your IT environment, and network security alerts. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation works across your data centers, multicloud environments, and endpoints. It is faster to deploy than infrastructure segmentation approaches and provides you with unparalleled visibility and control of your network.

Akamai

Docker containers make it easy to develop, deploy, and deliver applications where containers can be deployed and brought down in a matter of seconds. This flexibility makes it very useful for DevOps to automate deployment of containers. Symantec Data Center Security: Server Advanced provides agentless Docker container protection that allows you to achieve the performance benefits of Docker without sacrificing security. Full application control enables administrator privilege de-escalation, patch mitigation, and protection against zero day threats in today's heterogeneous data centers.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Symantec Data Center Security

February 2026

Free Report: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Symantec Data Center Security

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