A firewall is a common piece of equipment in a company’s network security toolbox. But in a threat environment that is always changing, some firewalls are more efficient than others. The only form of firewall with the capacity to defend contemporary enterprises against new cyberthreats is a next-generation firewall ( NGFW ).
However, not all NGFW are created in the same way. This post defines a next-generation firewall and shows how to choose one with top-notch protection and a great UI.
What is a Next-Generation Firewall?
Second generation firewalls, sometimes referred to as next generation firewalls, offer superior security capabilities to shield businesses. NGFWs examine encrypted data to perform deep packet inspection, intrusion prevention (IPS), malware detection, application control, and network visibility. They can be searched from an on-premise network’s edge to its interior borders in a public or private cloud.
Traditional Firewalls and Next-Generation Firewalls Differ in Important Ways
Traditional firewalls served as a sentinel that kept an eye on traffic entering and occasionally leaving the network. To decide whether to allow or prohibit data, these devices would examine packets, network addresses, and ports. Airline travel is a useful comparison. The firewall’s initial iterations only examined data to see whether it had a ticket and, if so, assuming its credentials were valid, allowed it to board the aircraft.
After then, application traffic exploded, outpacing the capabilities of first-generation firewalls. Because malware could be concealed inside application traffic, where the firewall ticket taker couldn’t see it, thieves were able to do just that.
Next-generation firewalls include Application Control and Intrusion Prevention System to identify known and unknown attacks (IPS). By attentively observing network traffic, this new technology may see into programmes, locate, and prevent malware. Imagine it as the boarding process for your airline with an x-ray machine added. Even if you had a ticket, you couldn’t enter if your luggage included something hazardous.
Over time, further security inspection technologies were incorporated throughout the procedure, such as ransomware remediation using anti-malware. These may be compared to body scanners and washing down bags to check for bomb-making materials. Unfortunately, the security gateway developed into a significant bottleneck as inspections increased in frequency. The growth of encrypted communication, which gives consumers the security of safely accessing apps from anywhere to anyplace, has added to all of this.
Traditional firewalls were overly simplistic, but some of the next-generation firewall’s worst flaws are their complexity and processing demands. In order to avoid making a compromise, it’s crucial to pick your next-generation firewall in a way that balances security capabilities and performance.
The Advantages of a Next-Generation Firewall
The networking landscape of today is more intricate than ever. Instead of being borderless, networks have become permeable as endpoints and sources of access grow at an unprecedented rate. 75 percent of all phishing websites utilised SSL in the first quarter of 2020, according to the most recent Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) report.
This requires high-speed decryption, deep packet inspection after decryption, the ability to detect dangerous URLs, the ability to identify command-and-control operations, the ability to download malware, and threat correlation. These capabilities, however, are infamous for crippling even the most sophisticated commercial NGFW since they are so CPU-intensive.
The capabilities of NGFW are being redefine by these criteria.
The truth is that almost all of the firewall systems and platforms that are currently on the market are ineffective. Which contributes to the fact that businesses spend billions of dollars year on security and that both the frequency and gravity of cybercrime continue to increase. Instead, they are developing in sophistication and are being pushed by lucrative services like MaaS, or malware as a service.
Three features must be included of the upcoming firewall security generation:
1. Power and Performance
There are two unavoidable facts about networks: (1) the breadth and scale of networks will continue to grow; and (2) the volume of data, driven by things like IoT and the Cloud, will continue to increase. This expansion must be make possible by security tools without sacrificing resource and data security. Unfortunately, the majority of firewalls nowadays contain the two following serious performance flaws:
They frequently consist of a patchwork of many security solutions. Traffic must be route through an inspection mill with a lot of overhead in order to offer redundant security processing. Event detection is further challenging by the fact that these instruments frequently have independent administration interfaces.
When new essential features are adding, including threat intelligence and advance threat protection, the majority of security systems soon reach their capacity limits.
They are constructing utilising CPUs and other parts that are readily available. Even the security software is scarcely optimise because the security technologies that make up the NGFW are often built independently. Automobiles would cost a million dollars, get five miles per gallon of petrol, and be limited to speeds of 20 mph if they were constructed in the same manner as most firewalls.
This is why most firewalls today collapse when they confront real-world traffic scenarios that need many levels of simultaneous inspection, SSL traffic decryption, and increasing network traffic volumes.
A new generation of firewalls that are built to meet the performance needs of modern networks are requiring.
2. Wide-ranging Visibility Outside of the Application
Simply looking at the traffic is not sufficient. The information gathered from such inspections must be shared in real time with the rest of the network in order to identify many of the most sophisticated threats of today. Unfortunately, the majority of NGFW solutions available today work alone. Many security products don’t communicate with each other on a single platform, let alone across a network.
But for today’s networks to be secure, cross-platform connectivity and the direct correlation of threat information are crucial. This capability must scale across today’s dispersed networks, including physical and virtual domains, IoT and other endpoint devices, multi-cloud environments with multiple IaaS and SaaS providers.
Attacks can come from inside the network, from rogue or compromised users, or from outside a network perimeter. NGFW systems require IPS and Anti-Malware to identify and respond to known and zero-day threats. Advanced Threat Protection must integrate sandboxing and other threat intelligence sources to combat unknown attacks.
3. Providing Hyperscale Performance and Security that Leads the Industry
Powered by Fortinet’s purpose-built Security Processing Units (SPUs), like the NP7 and CP9. FortiGate NGFWs have the industry’s best security compute rating, including support for TLS1.3, to identify HTTPS attacks like ZEUS, Trickbot, and Dridex and shield businesses from complex network, application, and file-based threats. Fortinet NGFWs offer hyperscale, the fastest concurrent connections and connections per second, and vital security to meet growing user expectations.
In the most demanding settings, such as hyperscale data centres, the Fortinet NFWs offer performance-intensive services to examine, segment, and secure locally hosted data and workloads at network speeds.
To expand and adapt to even the most elastic network settings, security devices and technologies must be integrating. This makes it possible to have end-to-end visibility of people, IoT devices, cloud apps, and access devices. In order to reduce complexity while securing the entire attack surface, an integrate Security Fabric that combines simple, unified management and orchestration, broad visibility, granular control, and centralised compliance capabilities is requiring due to the complexity of both network infrastructures and the threat landscape.
4. AI, automation, and deep inspection
Over distributed networks, performance and correlation are still insufficient. Within minutes of accessing a network, today’s threats may start stealing data or holding resources for ransom. Threats must be recognise quickly enough for security to react.
Networks can react to a threat in a coordinated way with the help of security automation. All devices link to the Security Fabric must be able to react instantly if malware or a breach has been found. Malware must be found and isolate as well as affected devices.
Today, this necessitates in-the-moment detailed scrutiny. Anti-malware, content disarm and reconstruct, and virus outbreak service skills must be a key need of today’s NGFWs rather than operating sandbox tools as distinct appliances or services, with all the difficulties and delays separate management and correlation tools bring.
In order for sensors to start searching the network for more instances of the identified assault, threat intelligence must also be transmit. To stop such breaches from happening, shields must be increase. For resources to be make available again, remediation is requiring. Anti-malware, content disarm and reconstruct, and virus outbreak service skills must be a key need of today’s NGFW rather than operating sandbox tools as separate appliances or services, with all the management and correlation difficulties that brings.
As compromise speed and penetration tactics advance, AI will be needed to monitor and even anticipate attacks, better coordinate threat response, and stop cybercriminals before they can achieve their goals.
Lastly, if you are looking for network security solution for your business, kindly get in touch with the specialist from Spectrum Edge who are the expert in equipping their clients with the best cyber security solutions.
Article published by Usmails.co
