Next-Gen Firewalls

For this post we are going to dive into Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) and better understand their importance and additional performance capabilities of older iterations of firewalls. Depending on the scale of the organization implementing a NGFW, the cost could be anywhere from 350$ for a lower end unit or software, to 350,000$ for the highest end unit. We will also obtain a better understanding of the differences between a NGFW and a Universal Threat Management (UTM) system as well.

A NGFW can come in a few different forms. It can come in the form of software which is simply downloaded onto your systems. It can come as a hardware component, imagine a larger router or switch with additional functionality. If your company uses the cloud for a large portion of their operations then it can be implemented as a Software as a Service (SaaS). A NGFW has all of the capabilities of traditional firewall such as stateful inspections, allowing/blocking traffic based on state, ports, protocols, and administrator rules. A NGFW goes the extra step and is able to do deeper inspections into applications which is becoming a much more vulnerable area within the IT world. It has an integrated Intrusion Prevention System (IPS). Able to Identify threats across the network, and many more. So NGFW have a plethora of additional benefits, but who would this likely benefit? Typically mid-size to much larger enterprises could benefit from a NGFW system as it can be complicated to implement in the network due to it’s capability to have such a large reach. Your average home user should not ever need a NGFW of any sort and can get by fine with a traditional firewall.

A big misunderstanding that is prevalent today is the difference between a NGFW and a UTM. On paper they seem to have the same security services. They both have Firewalls, IPS, URL filtering, etc. So what is the difference between the two? The primary difference between the two is that a NGFW is more customizable, where the UTM is much easier to deploy and manage. A UTM can be much easier to implement for smaller or medium size businesses where a NGFW again can be better utilized for a larger business with a much more expanded network. Truly it is up to your IT team and if they have the available personnel to adapt and manage a NGFW as a UTM takes a much smaller amount of time and resources to use.