"Inconceivable!" Or, How the Network Became Interesting Again.

“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” -Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride (1987).

It’s time to reconsider what we mean when we say NGFWs (Next Gen Firewalls) and Secure Web Gateways.

When is a thing no longer the thing it was originally? 

If that sounds too squishy for you, hang on, I promise I’m going somewhere concrete.

We all have cognitive biases: a tendency for our brain to see patterns where none exist, to trade speed for accuracy, and to help us gain agreement as social animals. 

There’s a bias in psychology called functional fixedness in which we are unable to think of how else to use a tool other than the way it’s most commonly used. I suggest that one of the impacts of this bias is our inability to see new use cases or outcomes for a technology, even as it changes significantly. 

The term smartphone was utilized in various formats for at least 10 years before the launch of the iPhone.

Ten. Years.

We went through iterations of the way to describe this emergent concept: two words, capitalized, competing ideas like PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), and so on. But why? Because vendors were inventing or modifying devices and trying to differentiate the use cases (outcomes) from existing mobile phones. Now we’ve come full circle and simply say “phone”. It’s implied that any mobile phone is ‘smart’.

I hear the engineers and security practitioners thinking loudly, “Who cares what it’s called?” 

Answer: We all should. 

What you call something shapes what you think it can be used for. 

We are at the confluence of competing ideas and approaches around the dynamic edge of our networks. How do we flexibly secure them? Cloud to the Edge, Secure Enterprise SD-WAN, NGFW, SIG (Secure Internet Gateway), Edge Computing, SWG (Secure Web Gateway), and the list goes on.

Don’t get bogged down in old terminology and let a bias creep into your planning assumptions. Consider the outcomes you want and map out the technology services you need to support those outcomes. Then, go take a fresh look at vendors and the novel solutions that are emerging.

NGFW? “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”