If you’re planning to invest in an NGFW, there are many things you should know before making the purchase. For example, you should choose a firewall that can handle your organization’s unique traffic load.
NGFWs also typically support threat intelligence feeds from a worldwide research team to keep your organization safe from the latest threats and malware signatures.
Cost
Investing in Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) is a critical security upgrade for businesses. These devices have many capabilities and can help protect a company from cyberattacks and data leakage.
NGFWs improve upon traditional firewalls by utilizing deep packet inspection (DPI). Instead of filtering incoming and outgoing traffic, this technology performs a detailed analysis of the entire packet, including its contents. This allows NGFWs to detect malicious codes, malware signatures, and other threats that aren’t visible to traditional firewalls.
Aside from DPI, NGFWs also offer application awareness and control. This capability enables organizations to allow applications they trust and block unwanted ones, reducing the risk of security breaches.
Additionally, NGFWs are capable of identifying and decrypting HTTPS and TLS-encrypted communications. This allows them to identify and prevent threats that are rooted in encrypted traffic.
Lastly, NGFWs may include an integrated or standalone intrusion prevention system (IPS) feature. This critical component of network security helps prevent attacks like brute force, known vulnerabilities, and DDoS.
Since it is a substantial expenditure, businesses must choose to invest in NGFW and select the best one for their requirements. Platform basis, feature set, performance, management, and affordability are some factors that may be used to evaluate a firewall’s capabilities.
Scalability
A next-generation firewall (NGFW) is a type of security device that combines traditional firewall features like packet filtering and stateful inspection with others to protect your network from advanced threats. These features allow an NGFW to detect, identify, and mitigate malware and other attacks that traditional firewalls cannot.
Investing in NGFW also allows you to scale your security infrastructure as your business grows. This helps you keep up with your customers’ needs while lowering your total cost of ownership.
For example, you can scale your NGFW to support new cloud applications without investing in additional hardware. It can also help you protect your clients’ data while boosting their productivity by allowing them to work from anywhere using encrypted VPN tunnels.
In addition, an NGFW can help you automate routine security tasks such as impact assessment and security policy tuning. This can free up your team to focus on other activities that benefit the company.
To scale your NGFW for resiliency and performance, you can deploy it as part of an instance group on Compute Engine or in the data center. This enables you to horizontally scale your firewalls while managing them as one entity through Panorama, Palo Alto Networks’ centralized management solution.
Cybersecurity vendor Palo Alto Networks announced a cloud NGFW service integrating Amazon Web Services (AWS) with next-generation firewall capabilities. It aims to deliver best-in-class network security that can be deployed, configured, and managed as easily as a native AWS service.
Reliability
NGFWs are critical to any network’s security arsenal because they prevent cyber threats from entering an organization’s system. They also protect against malware, viruses, worms, spyware, and other malicious software that can cause damage to network infrastructure and digital assets.
Unlike traditional firewalls, NGFWs can detect and block malware at the application layer. That means they can stop threats from infiltrating your corporate network, accessing sensitive data, and ruining your reputation before they can do so.
Additionally, NGFWs can thwart other malware threats that traditional firewalls can’t spot. These include malicious code and files that can infect network users’ computers with malware or execute unauthorized functions such as backdoors or DDoS attacks.
As with any network security solution, NGFWs must be updated periodically to keep them up to date with the latest security threats. This is similar to the need for antivirus and EDR software.
In addition to securing your enterprise network, NGFWs can provide comprehensive visibility into traffic between your internal and external networks. Depending on the vendor, this can range from simple network traffic monitoring to sophisticated behavior-based analytics.
NGFWs are an excellent choice for large service providers, data centers, and organizations requiring scalable network security solutions. They can handle a wide range of network traffic, including SSL-encrypted connections. The best NGFWs offer centralized access control, which lets administrators determine the applications and devices that can use network resources. They can also adjust bandwidth allowances for optimal network performance.
Security
NGFWs provide several security features that help protect networks from threats. These include threat intelligence, IPS, malware protection, application control, data loss prevention (DLP), mobile device security, and more. They also integrate with third-party user directories for a dynamic identity-based policy that gives administrators more granular visibility and control than static IP-based policies.
Unlike traditional firewalls, which rely on signature-based detection to identify threats, NGFWs analyze the contents of every data packet that enters or leaves the network. This provides greater visibility and makes it easier to detect and block a range of modern malware, including the newest and stealthiest attacks.
In addition, NGFWs are more effective at protecting against malicious web traffic. They decrypt HTTPS-encrypted tunnels to inspect content and identify applications in use.
One of the most important things to consider when deciding on an NGFW is whether or not it will work well in your environment. This includes knowing what bandwidth you need to secure your business, how many users will access the network, and ensuring that the NGFW can handle incoming and outgoing traffic.
Lastly, it would help if you asked your vendor about the NGFW’s ability to change its security posture in response to the evolving threats. This is a crucial feature in today’s world, where hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated and can bypass security defenses.
