Friday 1 May 2015

How Enterprise Firewall Handles Growing Threats to Network Security

Enterprise firewall is recognised as the backbone of network security. This long-established workhorse needs to be updated to successfully withstand the sophisticated ways of network security breaches that have become a bigger threat for business organizations. Use of latest generation of firewall by enterprises crossed 50 per cent in the year 2013 and this trend is showing signs of continuing even in 2015.

The techies responsible for managing and securing enterprise networks are wary of application-level risks as well as slow and subtle, multi-modal attacks. Both these types of attacks tend to slip past traditional firewalls. Organizations looking to upgrade their technology need to ensure that the new applications they install are not vulnerable to threats.

Traditional firewalls are still useful but not adequate for organizations that need to upgrade their networking systems. The extra features of next generation firewalls have become critical for certain advanced applications. Let us understand this “next generation” enterprise or network firewall.

Next Generation Network Firewall

The term next generation, in the context of network or enterprise firewall, implies a software or hardware-based security that goes beyond the general methods of URL blocking, network address translation, and packet filtering. This advanced firewall comes with granular controls that enable it to conduct a detailed examination of the Web application traffic that passes through it. The firewall is not restricted to examining traffic data only of certain packets, as it is able to track each packet of traffic to larger transactions.

Tracking packets to specific large transactions is not a simple achievement as it enables application-level awareness in the firewall. In addition to this, its other advanced features include intrusion prevention, quality of service, SSH and SSL inspection, malware detection and deep packet inspection. Another important aspect of latest enterprise firewall technology is cloud-based threat intelligence.

Firewall for the Cloud

In order to use contemporary applications, enterprises now need to upgrade their network protection with cloud-based intelligence. Development of firewall which provides threat intelligence by factoring in the various aspects of cloud computing is the way forward for many organizations. Such firewalls offer centralized management and can be customized to be implemented on a global scale.

The capabilities of network firewall continue to evolve to bring contextually-aware intelligence as the fight against malware and other attacks intensifies. Companies need to install something that suits their network architecture and budget and for this, they need to find service providers capable of high end customizations.

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