The importance of next generation firewalls

Despite the benefits of a digital and always-on business environment, cybersecurity risks have also evolved to become more sophisticated and increasingly widespread. Thus, traditional defensive measures are no longer adequate, resulting in the need to adopt more adaptable solutions, such as next generation firewalls.

Analysts define this as “deep packet inspection firewalls”That go beyond inspection and blocking ports / protocols to add application-level inspection, intrusion prevention and bring intelligence from outside the firewall. Therefore, unlike a standard firewall, next generation firewalls provide an organization with policy-based visibility and control over applications, users and threats.

Therefore, it is less about following the “all or nothing” route with incoming and outgoing traffic and more about taking a differentiated approach to protect the company's network (and data).

• Next-generation firewalls provide all the standard features expected from a firewall, but also incorporate several additional layers of security. This additional protection is provided further down the stack to include aspects such as application identification, user-based authentication, protection from malware, protection from exploitation, content filtering and location-based access control.
• The other significant difference is the speed advantage that a next generation firewall can offer the network. As more devices are added and more security services are activated, network congestion becomes a major concern when using a traditional firewall. However, next-generation firewalls provide high-speed defenses, regardless of the number of devices or how many protection services are active.