05 April 2016
While SDN and virtualisation won’t decrease the need for firewalls, FireMon reckons it may open the door to advancements or a new category of network protection.
The firewall remains at the centre of today’s security infrastructure, but will need to evolve as next-generation firewalls become the norm.
That’s according to the 2016 State of the Firewall report from FireMon. After polling around 600 IT security practitioners from a range of professional roles and organisations, the network security specialist uncovered three major trends.
Firstly, respondents believe firewalls remain an extremely valuable part of the network security infrastructure, even in the face of new technology paradigms such as the cloud.
Ninety-one per cent stated that firewalls are as critical as ever or more critical than ever to their security architecture. The same percentage believes that this will continue to be the case within the next five years.
Two thirds said firewalls are somewhat or highly valuable to the cloud services they manage. This represents a 10 per cent increase over 2015.
Secondly, the research found that next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) continue to see broad adoption, adding complexity to security management. NGFWs represent at least 50 per cent of current firewall infrastructure in nearly half of the organisations surveyed compared to 34 per cent in 2015. Only 6.7 per cent of organisations have no NGFWs.
Thirdly, FireMon says awareness around SDN and its impact on network security has increased. Ninety per cent of respondents recognised that SDN has impacted or will impact networking to a certain degree.
“We’re seeing small shifts in IT professionals’ perceptions of the firewall as new technologies enter the market,” said Jody Brazil, co-founder and chief product strategy officer at FireMon. “Adoption of SDN and network virtualisation in general won’t decrease the need for firewalls, but it may open the door to advancements or a new category of network protection. It will be more of a continuous evolution rather than a complete upheaval as so many are quick to claim.”
