Is your Firewall ready for the Next Generation?

The industry is moving to smarter and faster firewalls, they have combined the intelligence and awareness of an application and content with traditional firewall protections.  Next Gen firewalls have a tighter, more purpose-built architecture. They look deeper at the packets to create risk assessments that are coupled with the source and destination policies to better block both known and potential threats.

Fortinet is just one vendor that is using this next gen technology. They are using Custom Silicon Chips in their firewalls to deliver low latency deep inspection of packets against policy and content review to protect against Ransomware, malicious botnets, zero-day, and encrypted malware.

Every day there is a new data threat that needs dynamic protection. Hackers are exploiting weaknesses in the client applications at user level to act as authenticated users, saving them from attacking the hardened infrastructure itself. The deeper inspection of Next Gen firewalls are able to provide much greater visibility into networks. System admins can now create reports and visualizations to identify problem or usage as pertaining to user, devices, applications or threats.

A problem of previous generation threat tools was the speed of scanning. Older Firewalls needed extra time for Intrusion protection to scan and release packets.  This would which would cause application performance issues, and would lead to many organizations to set to monitor only without blocking the threats.The next gen firewall of tomorrow will have combined functions into one applicance from what formally took several separate appliance that didn’t talk with each other.  Functions including:

• Stateful Firewall
• Intrusion Prevention
• Application Policies
• User/Device Identity & Authentication
• Anti-malware
• Web Filtering
• IP Reputation
• SSL Inspecton
• IPsec/SSL VPN
• Management & Reporting

Today’s next gen firewalls will also exchange threat assessment information with secure and constantly updating clouds, like an immune system, so that as one becomes aware of a threat, they all do. To learn more about firewalls and how Thrive can help manage them contact us today!