What is a Next Generation Firewall? What You Need to Know?

When it comes to network security, few tools are as integral as the firewall. Firewalls act as a gateway between the local network and the internet and determine who and what has access to information contained within your network. ?

There is a misconception that firewall is ineffective in the age of hybrid working, however they still play a vital role in securing the enterprise network.? ?

What is a Next Generation Firewall? And why is it important? ??

With?research?showing that ransomware breaches have increased by 13% over the last year, Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) are essential for detecting threat actors who are trying to establish a foothold within the network.??

According to?Gartner, NGFWs are “deep-packet inspection firewalls that move beyond port/protocol inspection and blocking to add application-level inspection, intrusion prevention, and bringing intelligence from outside the firewall.” ?

NGFWs use static and dynamic packet filtering to analyse traffic moving in and out of the network and determine what communications are blocked or permitted. ?

When analysing traffic, the NGFW uses threat intelligence to scan for known and unknown malware threats and other malicious activity. These solutions also use application whitelisting and blacklisting to distinguish between trusted and malicious applications.?

So What’s the Difference Between a NGFW and a Traditional Firewall? ??

Although both types of firewalls inspect incoming and outgoing network traffic, the key difference between the two is that NGFWs can filter traffic based on individual applications, whereas traditional firewalls can’t. As a result, the former provides greater visibility over activity at the application-layer. ?

The Firewall as Mission Critical Infrastructure?

While firewalls are a security essential, it’s important to note that they’re also a critical dependency. If a firewall fails then users will be unable to access business apps or complete their day-to-day responsibilities. This means a single failure could cost tens of thousands of pounds in damage because of downtime. ?

As a result, organisations?need to ensure that they have a highly available deployment as per best practices, that they employ proactivity in configuring, monitoring, governance and reviewing performance to ensure optimal performance and proactively dealing with issues that could pose risk, before they become service affecting.?

Proactive monitoring ensures that if issues are discovered, the security team can respond quickly to restore the functionality of the service to avoid prolonged downtime or disruption.

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