NGFWs help organizations prevent cyberattacks with granular policies, streamlined threat intelligence and built-in malware protection. They also provide scalable performance, flexible usage-based policy optimization and integrated DNS security. The best NGFW offers full visibility into networks and applications – including SaaS apps – and can control access on a deep level. Choosing one that’s affordable, effective and geared to SMBs is critical.
Scalability
Traditional firewalls only protect a network from attacks based on ports or protocols (single-layer protection). An NGFW can move up to the application layer of the TCP/IP stack and apply an intrusion detection system, antimalware, sandboxing, and other functions. This allows them to identify and block advanced threats that have already evaded traditional firewalls. This requires deep packet inspection (PPI) at high-performance levels, decryption, analysis of commands and payloads within SSL traffic, download of malware from remote sites, and threat correlation.
These features are highly CPU-intensive and bring many NGFWs to their knees. NGFWs must also be able to integrate security services with the firewall for parallel processing and faster response times. This enables them to detect and respond to known and zero-day threats quickly and automatically. They must also be able to work in conjunction with other network and security tools like sandboxing, antivirus, and other antimalware software. This is the only way to provide a complete, holistic and automated approach to detect and respond to threats crossing a network perimeter.
Intuitive User Interface
Unlike traditional firewalls that rely on 5-tuple information to identify network traffic, NGFW, with application identification technology, can distinguish applications corresponding to the traffic. As a result, it’s easy to detect applications that gobble up bandwidth and help mitigate risk. Moreover, it integrates multiple security services, such as IPS and antivirus, with the firewall for parallel processing to deliver high detection performance.
It’s crucial to select the ideal remedy. For instance, numerous benefits are provided by FortiGate advantages. As a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant, Fortinet’s NGFW provides advanced capabilities such as malware detection and prevention, secure application enablement, domain name system (DNS) security, panorama security management, and threat intelligence to strengthen the overall security posture of organizations. For example, NGFW can natively inspect SSL-encrypted traffic and does not require additional plugins to perform SSL inspection. NGFW can also detect and block new threats that bypass security policies applied at layers 3 and 4 of the OSI model. This is possible because NGFW inspects packets at multiple levels, including layer seven and beyond. In addition, NGFW can recognize the data content of an email, website, or streaming traffic to prevent attackers from using these methods to attack networks.
High Performance
With cloud applications and internet-enabled devices reshaping the network environment, it’s no longer feasible to route internet traffic back to corporate data centers for security monitoring. Instead, business users rely on local internet breakouts to establish fast connections with their applications. This requires handling large amounts of long-lived connections, performing SSL inspection at a high-performance level and detecting attacks by examining behavior patterns or comparing them to known threats.
Unlike traditional firewalls that operate at layer 4 of the OSI model (transport), NGFWs can analyze packet content by performing deep packet inspection. This process is much more efficient than analyzing 5-tuple information such as source and destination IP address, port number and protocol to identify traffic. NGFWs can also integrate multiple services into one platform, delivering high-performance detection capabilities and advanced visibility into the attack surface. Unlike UTM, which processes packets module by module with low processing capacity, an NGFW uses an intelligent awareness engine to execute integrated processing on packet content, making it ideal for application identification and control.
Flexibility
In today’s threat landscape, a firewall that blocks cyber threats doesn’t cut it. You need a solution to identify advanced attacks that bypass traditional firewalls, like malware and ransomware. A good NGFW solution will provide deeper inspection and protection of network traffic with advanced content-based security functions such as application control, DPI, quality of service/bandwidth management, VPN inspection, TLS/SSL encrypted traffic inspection, third-party identity management integration and more. This ensures the solution can protect your network from modern threats that exploit security gaps and attack multiple infrastructure layers. NGFW solutions also offer high availability, so if one of your hardware or software firewalls fails, a second device will take over automatically. This enables business-critical activities to continue seamlessly without any disruption. A flexible consumption model makes it easy to scale your solution up or down as needed, with no need to procure a new firewall model each time. This means you can save on upfront costs and instead purchase Software NGFW Credits to use as your needs change.
Threat Prevention
The security features on an NGFW are constantly updating to find and block new attack threats as they surface. This requires more and better resources (CPU, memory, etc.) than a traditional stateful firewall that typically only reviews the header and TCP sections of a network packet, checking its source and destination internet address and port and whether it’s allowed or blocked by a rule set configured on the device. An NGFW can also look deeper into the data section of the packet, breaking it open to review the webpage content to see if there is any malicious code or other unwanted information before it is allowed through to the internet user. This is a major step up in cybersecurity from traditional firewalls.
NGFW also comes with other security tools like built-in URL filtering, powerful malware protection that monitors file activity to identify and destroy threats and is powered by a world-class threat intelligence organization. Having all these features in one package means you don’t have to pay for multiple separate tools and can save time and effort monitoring the security of your network.
