Next generation firewall for ultimate network protection

Creation of barriers or creating a wall is one of the best ways to keep the intruders and strangers at bay.

The same concept works in the online realm. Technology has given a way for us to filter network traffic through several layers that are all intended to keep hackers and viruses at bay. These cyber attacks are common among application, transport and network as well as data link level. But the introduction of the next generation firewall creates more efficient ways.

Traditional firewall security Vs New generation firewall

The old or traditional firewall used to refine traffic based upon ports and protocols. For instance, blocking or allowing the entire port 80 for HTTP traffic or port 443 for HTTPS traffic. This can be said as "all-or-nothing" approach.

However, newer firewall technology takes care or filters the traffic based upon the applications or traffic types traversing these ports. For instance, port 80 for only select HTTP traffic can be opened, or for those with specific applications, sites, or services that you wish allow. This can be taken as mixing the firewall and quality of service (QoS) functionalities into one solution.

The application-aware firewalls are already considered next-generation firewall or NGFW but are originally form of a unified threat management (UTM) solution. However, the UTM is referred to the products, which face deficiency in true application-awareness and are directed towards the SMB market. Threat management solutions are equipped to offer additional functionalities (antivirus, antispam, or intrusion prevention systems (IPS)) over traditional firewalls lending excellent cyber security.

Both the aspects, security and bandwidth control is possible due to fine-tuning of traffic feature lent by NGFWs. They are designed to act smarter, as they deeply inspect possessing great potential to capture more malicious activity. Other reason for preferring them over traditional firewall is functionality as content filters lending QoS functions. This signifies that higher priority applications receive higher priority bandwidth. The need of newer firewall security is not just limited to improved cyber security, but NGFWs are desired due to enhanced cloud services and outsourced software as a service (SaaS) providers.

Common features of NGFWs:

Standard firewall characteristics: Port/protocol inspection, network address translation (NAT), and VPN are some of the common firewall functionalities.

Application identification and filtering: This one is the main feature making it easier to identify and filter traffic associated with specific applications. It hinders malicious applications and activities from utilizing non-standard ports to avoid the firewall.

SSL and SSH inspection: Additional safety from malicious applications by using encryption.

Intrusion prevention: Wiser and deeper traffic monitoring makes new generation firewalls easier to carry out intrusion detection and prevention.

Directory integration: Most NGFWs incorporates directory support making management of authorized applications based on users and user groups.

Malware filtering: NGFWs offer reputation-based filtering to ban applications having bad reputation.