The firewall remains at the centre of IT’s security infrastructure, but it will need to evolve as next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) become the norm, and as emerging infrastructure paradigms such as SDN, cloud and micro-segmentation take hold. That’s according to a 2016 State of the Firewall Report from FireMon, a provider of network security management products.
The second annual report is based on a November 2015 survey completed by about 600 IT security practitioners from a range of professional roles, organisation sizes and industry verticals.
Firewalls remain an extremely valuable part of the network security infrastructure, even in the face of new technology paradigms such as the cloud. Most, 91 percent of respondents 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 of respondents stated that firewalls are somewhat or highly valuable to the cloud services they manage. This represents a 10 percent increase over 2015.
Jody Brazil, co-founder and Chief Product Strategy Officer at FireMon, said: “We’re seeing small shifts in IT professionals’ perceptions of the firewall as new technologies enter the market. 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.”
You can download FireMon’s 2016 State of the Firewall Report.
