CovertSwarm has been named a Sample Vendor for Red Teaming as a Service in the Gartner Hype Cycle for XaaS, 2026, published 7 July 2026. Five weeks earlier, the Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2026 named CovertSwarm a Sample Vendor in the same category.
CovertSwarm has been named a Sample Vendor for Red Teaming as a Service in the Gartner Hype Cycle for XaaS, 2026, published 7 July 2026.
Five weeks earlier, the Gartner Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2026 named CovertSwarm a Sample Vendor in the same category.
The definition hasn’t changed either. Gartner defines the category this way: “Red teaming as a service (RTaaS) delivers continuous, on-demand threat-led adversarial testing through a subscription model that combines humans and automation.”* In our view, that is a description of how we have run this company from the start.
In our opinion, the Hype Cycle for XaaS isn’t a security report. It examines 28 innovations in the everything-as-a-service market, and it’s written for heads of infrastructure and operations. These are the people who decide how enterprise IT gets bought and run, not the people who own the threat model.
That’s the signal. Enterprises have spent a decade moving what they own into what they consume. Compute, storage, backup, desktops, payments: each became a service because ownership couldn’t keep pace with the rate of change. We believe offensive security testing is following the same arc, for the same reason. An attack surface that rebuilds itself weekly can’t be validated by an engagement built around a fixed point in time.
This report, in our opinion, puts continuous offensive testing in front of the people running that shift. Not as a security purchase, but as part of the operating model they’re already building everywhere else. When the rest of the enterprise runs as a service, a testing program with a start date and an end date becomes the anomaly.
In the report, Gartner rates Red Teaming as a Service as a High benefit innovation with Emerging maturity and market penetration of 5% to 20% of its target audience. We read that as a window. The category is established enough for independent analysts to define it, and early enough that most organizations haven’t moved.
If your testing strategy still assumes an annual engagement, the category both reports describe is a different model. Continuous, subscription-based, threat-led, combining humans and automation. We believe that’s the standard your board and your infrastructure peers will start measuring against.
If you’d rather see continuous red teaming in practice than read about the category, talk to the Swarm. We’ll show you what testing without a fixed scope or an end date looks like against your own attack surface.
*Gartner, Hype Cycle for XaaS, 2026, Jason Donham, 7 July 2026.
*Gartner, Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2026, Darren Livingstone, Jonathan Nunez, 5 June 2026.
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