Domestic substitution enters the 'deep-water zone': having replaced the 'foreign guns and cannons', is your line of defence still secure?

In January this year, with the official implementation of relevant policies, the domestic cybersecurity industry ushered in a watershed. Old faces like Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Check Point, which once occupied the domestic high-end market, are accelerating their exit from the stage of history.

For some local cybersecurity vendors, this is an overwhelming windfall; but for enterprise front-line CISOs and security teams, it is more like an imminent and unavoidable hard battle.

We must complete the replacement of core defense facilities within an extremely short period of time. This is not just the mounting and dismounting of equipment, but the reconstruction of the entire defense logic and policy system.

In this process, everyone is facing a huge "trust vacuum" that they dare not answer easily:

"We have replaced them with domestic firewalls and EDRs. Compliance is met, but what is our actual defensive capability?"

The Pain of Replacement: The Chasm from "Feature Mapping" to "Performance Alignment"

In the past, when we did localization replacement, we often valued feature mapping.

• Foreign firewalls have application identification, and domestic ones have it too.

• Foreign EDRs have behavioral analysis, and domestic ones have it too.

• A comparison on the parameter table shows that this is an equivalent replacement.

But in the actual combat environment of 2026, we find that "features" do not equal "effectiveness."

The core advantage of foreign leading vendors often lies not in hardware performance, but in the vast global intelligence network behind them and the detection algorithms polished over decades. When we remove these devices and replace them with domestic ones, we should confirm whether we have reached or approached the original level of detection and defense.

The most terrifying risk occurs at the moment of cutover and the subsequent run-in period. Is policy migration accurate? Can the new detection engine identify the latest APT attacks? Can domestic devices link with each other as smoothly as before? If there is a lack of effective measurement means, these questions will become "unknowns" buried in the production environment for a certain period of time.

Filling the Vacuum: Measuring "Replacement Quality" with "Validation"

In this round of supply chain reconstruction, security validation is no longer an optional optimization tool; it has become a yardstick to ensure successful replacement.

We need to establish a set of "offensive-to-verify-defense" acceptance standards to answer the questions of "how is the domestic capability performing now" and "where should we improve." The core logic of this set of standards is: don't look at the advertisement, look at the efficacy; don't look at the parameters, look at the results.

1. "Establishing a Baseline" before Migration Before removing foreign equipment, first use the SecXun Smart Security Validation Platform to run a standard set of attack playbooks (covering ransomware, cryptomining, APT attack techniques, etc.). Record the current block rate and response time. This is your current "security water level baseline."

2. "Regression Testing" after Migration After replacing with domestic equipment and configuring the policies, do not rush to sign off on acceptance. Immediately run the same set of attack playbooks. Compare the data of the two runs:

• If the block rate remains flat or rises, congratulations, the replacement is successful, and there is data to prove it.

• If the block rate drops (for example, the previous device could block C2 communication, but the current one did not), you immediately know where the problem lies—whether the policy configurations are not aligned or the new device has a gap in its detection capability.

1. Targeted "Intelligence Compensation" If it is found that domestic equipment has gaps in detecting certain specific threats, this does not mean the replacement failed. Through SecXun's Advanced Persistent Threat Intelligence Platform, we can convert missing IOC and TTPs signatures into validation scripts to push domestic vendors to upgrade their signature databases or optimize their policies. Feed back to domestic equipment with high-quality "validation" and "intelligence" to accelerate their maturity and coverage.

Rebuilding Confidence: Moving from "Passive Compliance" to "Active Control"

The core demand of this policy is "independence and control." But true independence and control mean not only that the code is written by ourselves, but also that we have absolute right to know and control the effectiveness of our defense system.

Relying on the "black box" protection of foreign vendors is a blind sense of security.

Relying on the "white box" replacement of domestic vendors, if there is a lack of validation, may be an anxious sense of security.

Perhaps only by introducing an independent, third-party adversarial exposure validation mechanism can we always remain clear-headed in this round of massive transformation.

For CISOs, when you report upward with a "Domestic Replacement Security Effectiveness Validation Report," your confidence will be completely different. What you report is no longer "we responded to the national call and replaced the equipment," but: "We completed the localization replacement of core components, and through 5,000 real-world simulated validations, proved that our defense system remains rock-solid, and even improved efficiency by 20% in defending against local and global threats."

The localization replacement in 2026 is a systematic project involving technology, ecology, and trust.

In this process, equipment can be replaced, and architectures can be changed, but the bottom line of "real-world effectiveness" cannot be lost. Let "continuous validation" become the "quality inspector" of localization replacement. This is not only responsible for the enterprise, but also the most pragmatic practice of national security strategy.

We support domestic products, but we support "validated and effective" domestic products even more.