Continued consolidation of capabilities means high performing products. Your Challenge Every enterprise needs to implement the right security solutions to protect its operations and its data; “Firewalls” are a table-stakes requirement for an enterprise to be secure. Next Generation Firewalls (NGFW) have replaced Unified Threat Management (UTM) systems as feature portfolios broaden. Picking the right solution means appropriate protection at an acceptable cost; picking wrong could mean higher cost, lower security, or both. Our Advice Critical Insight The only traffic that counts anymore is HTTP/S: as all traffic becomes Web traffic, controlling traffic flow by protocol becomes keyed to digging into Port 80 (and 443) traffic. Inbound is no longer the only direction that threats flow: as security focus has shifted from infrastructure to data, protection needs to address outbound flow as much as inbound attacks. Firewalls can’t protect traffic they can’t see: encrypted traffic obfuscates threats from Firewalls while Wi-Fi networks allow attacks to bypass them entirely; modern solutions must control these traffic types as well. Impact and Result Enterprises that plan carefully and select thoughtfully can improve enterprise security while reducing cost and trimming administrative effort with a capable UTM/NGFW; the broader capabilities these tools offer means organizations can get rid of older point solutions that supported the incumbent firewall.

1. Today’s firewall products must protect both ingress and egress traffic and data to ensure truly comprehensive
protection.
Firewalls originated theoretically in the late 1980s before being brought to fruition as traffic-controlling tools.
Firewalls have evolved four times over from simple packet filters (that evaluated source, destination and protocol) to
stateful inspectors (with the capability of “remembering” the nature of ongoing communications and origin of the
packets involved), proxies (evaluated packet contents, rather than just the packets) to Unified Threat Management
systems (UTMs) or Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs).
The last – originating as the term UTM – began integrating capabilities such as anti-malware and intrusion
prevention for a more robust firewall.
While there is still debate over the semantics, UTMs are now frequently referred to as Next Generation Firewalls.
Built-in Data Leakage Protection (DLP) capabilities ensures that sensitive or confidential data is protected.
Encrypted traffic can conceal threats from firewalls, while Wi-Fi networks provide a route for attacks to bypass
firewalls. Today’s firewall solutions focus on controlling these types of traffic.
Despite the breadth of features, NGFW should not have a significant impact to your overall network performance,
even if you have the capabilities fully “switched on.”
NGFWs reflect a movement towards more content-aware security, combining additional capabilities on top of anti-malware
and intrusion prevention, such as:
Data Leakage Protection (DLP)
Network Access Control (NAC)
Application control
User identity-related control
And a growing number are adding web application firewalling functionality.
As more organizations seek out consolidated solutions for economical savings and resource management, NGFW will
be replacing most standalone security solutions like DLP. Some vendors have already started phasing out standalones
this year.