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What is a Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW)?
The Cyber Security Review | Thursday, September 29, 2022
Based on the NGFW vendor, organization environment, and security requirements, installing an NGFW can be as simple as a few clicks.
FREMONT, CA: Next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) are the third-generation and ongoing standard for firewall technology. After adopting web application firewalls (WAF) and unified threat management (UTM) in the 2000s, the innovation of NGFWs was a giant leap forward. These modern firewalls cover the gamut of traditional firewall services but go further in offering intrusion prevention systems (IPS), deep-packet inspection (DPI), modern threat protection, and Layer-7 application control technics.
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What Are NGFW Features?
Organizations await the most up-to-date tools and resources for managing their security infrastructure, including NGFW capabilities. Therefore, when considering NGFW vendors and products, look for these standard and modern features.
Application And Identity Awareness
A critical dissimilarity between traditional firewalls and NGFWs is the latter's ability to protect the application and user identity levels. Whereas traditional firewalls rely on standard application ports, NGFWs can identify, allow, block, and limit applications regardless of port or protocol. In addition, NGFWs' ability to recognize identity adds to its control by allowing administrators to apply firewall rules more granularly to certain groups and users.
Concentrated Management, Visibility, And Auditing
To actively manage a network's defenses, administrators require an accessible and configurable dashboard to view and manage security systems like NGFWs. Most NGFWs include log analysis, policy management, and a dashboard that can track security health, analyze traffic patterns, and export firewall rules for utilization elsewhere.
Stateful Inspection
Also called dynamic packet filtering, traditional firewalls use the stateful inspection to inspect traffic up to Layer 4. NGFWs are built to track Layers 2-7. This advancement allows NGFWs to execute a traditional firewall's same stateful inspection duties—distinguishing between safe and unsafe packets. The growth of dynamic packet filtering to the application layer is invaluable as crucial resources move toward the network edge.
Deep Packet Inspection
Deep packet inspection (DPI) goes further in inspecting traffic than stateful inspection. More targeted than stateful inspection, which observes all traffic and just the packet headers, DPI examines the data part & header of transmitted packets. Fulfilled at the application layer, DPI can locate, categorize, block, or reroute packets with problematic code or data payloads not detected in the stateful inspection.
Integrated Intrusion Prevention (IPS)
Intrusion prevention systems (IPS) once sat beside the firewall, playing defender against new threats outside the protected network. While conventional firewalls managed traffic flows about network information, IPS devices took on inspecting, alerting, and even strenuously ridding malware and intruders from the network.
IPS technology has been a precious integration into NGFW product offerings as cybersecurity products have improved. While the difference is growing narrower, the challenge for buyers turns into whether the IPS technology involved with their NGFW is good enough to forego a standalone IPS product. IPS can prevent attacks like brute force, familiar vulnerabilities, and Denial of Service (DoS).
Network Sandboxing
Based on your NGFW selection, you may have access to a network sandbox or have the option of counting such on a subscription basis. Network sandboxing is one means of advanced malware protection since it allows IT professionals the chance to send a possibly malicious program to a secure, isolated, cloud-based environment where administrators can check the malware before using it in-network.
Secured Traffic
HTTPS is the modern standard for network communication over the internet, utilizing the SSL/TLS protocol for encrypting such communications. As the principal network traffic inspector, NGFWs are now used to decrypt SSL and TLS communications, often with remote VPN capabilities.
To secure encrypted traffic, NGFWs encourage all inbound and outbound SSL decryption. This monitoring guarantee that the infrastructure can identify and prevent threats rooted in encrypted network flows.
Threat Intelligence And Dynamic Lists
Most NGFW vendors provide some form of threat intelligence. However, new threats arise daily, and expecting firewall administrators to be aware and online around the clock can be a recipe for disaster. Instead, NGFWs can use a global network's updates on the latest threats and attack sources with third-party threat intelligence feeds to block threats & implement real-time policy changes.
Indicators of compromise (IoC) are shared globally, advising your NGFW of malicious traffic to eradicate or block spontaneously without the 3 a.m. call or to surface events that need attention. Threats identified in-house can also be responded to with dynamic lists. NGFWs make threat trailing more automated and less prone to human error with threat intelligence feeds and dynamic lists in your toolbox.
Integration Capacity
Organizations, small and large, remain to ramp up third-party services that improve business processes, including numerous popular and mission-critical SaaS applications and APIs. In addition, as IT managers look at new products to incorporate into their organization's infrastructure, the product's capacity to integrate third-party applications is a must.
Simple integration means less stress for personnel navigating between software. Standard integrations involve SIEM software, 2FA, Active Directory, and reporting tools. In addition, application programming interfaces (API) play a critical role in policy orchestration and provisioning, where multiple software applications are in use.
Deployment Considerations
While NGFWs are important cybersecurity instruments, they alone are not a fix-all. Organizations often consider deploying an NGFW (or additional NGFWs) when replacing a firewall, IDPS, or both or adding more control and visibility. With firewall vendors aiming to keep your business, most providers give technical guidance on replacing legacy devices and improving the deployment process.
Like implementing a ZTNA, NGFWs must be tactically positioned according to the organization's security posture and most valuable assets. With a view into how network traffic interacts with critical resources, NGFWs aren't just for the network perimeter anymore. Positioning NGFWs at internal segment boundaries is catching steam and is a popular method for implementing micro-segmentation.
Based on the NGFW vendor, organization environment, and security requirements, installing an NGFW can be as simple as a few clicks. Once an organization's network cluster is activated, the fun of managing security specific to that segment's traffic initiates. In addition, managing one or multiple NGFWs with distinct configurations from a single dashboard has drastically eased the task of positioning cross-network traffic policies.
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