Choosing the right network firewall is one of the most essential decisions you will make for the network security of your business. Not all network firewalls are equally effective, and some products described as “firewalls” do little more than “stand guard” at a network edge, delivering basic functionality that provides less and less protection every year. Network firewalls with NGFW characteristics maintain all of the features of stateful firewalls, from packet filtering to VPN support, and also provide deeper inspection capabilities, application control, and advanced visibility, as well as include paths for future updates that allow them to evolve and keep the network system secure from future threats.
Today’s firewalls are way more than sentries at the edge of the network, and many have integrated capabilities such as intrusion prevention systems (IPS) that were traditionally standalone network security products. The next-generation firewall (NGFW), introduced in the 2000s, added application layer inspection and a number of other detection features intended to stand up to the expanding threat landscape. Over time, and especially as the variety, sophistication, and frequency of cyberattacks grew, firewalls needed to do more.
They usually acted as a gateway that sat between the local area network (LAN) and the Internet and examined and filtered packets coming in and out, making decisions on what to approve and what to reject based on attributes such as destination address or port number. When firewall technology first arrived decades ago, network firewalls were pretty basic.
There are many products on the market described as firewalls, ranging in price from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, based on the size and needs of the business and how the firewall will be maintained and supported. Today, every business that connects to the Internet needs a network firewall, not only to protect the network from attacks and malicious behavior, but also to enable business productivity as part of an integrated security architecture that keeps network connections reliable and secure.
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