Why next generation firewall

Next generation firewalls give companies more visibility into what applications their employees are using and control over their application use. At a minimum, a security policy rule of a network firewall says a connection from this source to this destination is allowed or denied.

The source and destination are traditionally defined as an IP address assigned to a laptop or is a larger network address that includes multiple users and servers. Next generation network firewall vendors solve this by integrating with third party user directories such as Microsoft Active Directory. Dynamic, identity-based policy provides granular visibility and control of users, groups and machines and is easier to manage than static, IP-based policy.

In a single, unified console administrators define the objects once. When network firewalls see a connection for the first time, the IP is mapped to the user and group by querying the third party user directory.

This dynamic user to IP mapping frees administrators from constantly updating the security policy. Threat prevention capabilities are a natural extension of next-gen firewalls deep packet inspection capabilities. As the traffic passes through the network firewall device, they also inspect the traffic for known exploits of existing vulnerabilities IPS.

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Security Essentials. What is a next generation firewall? What are the benefits of a next generation firewall? This could be a critical feature for any organization that allows network users to download applications from the internet. Blocks known productivity wasters With application control, the enterprise gains granular control over which applications can run, which features of an application can be used, and which applications should be given priority for bandwidth such as VOIP.

A next-generation firewall NGFW does this, and so much more. In addition to access control, NGFWs can block modern threats such as advanced malware and application-layer attacks. According to Gartner's definition, a next-generation firewall must include:. The best next-generation firewalls deliver five core benefits to organizations, from SMBs to enterprises. Make sure your NGFW delivers:. The No. But since preventive measures will never be percent effective, your firewall should also have advanced capabilities to quickly detect advanced malware if it evades your front-line defenses.

Invest in a firewall with the following capabilities:. You can't protect against what you can't see. You need to monitor what is happening on your network at all times so you can spot bad behavior and stop it fast.

Your firewall should provide a holistic view of activity and full contextual awareness to see:. Protect private clouds. Boost public cloud security.

Isolate and safeguard critical systems. Meet demand with automatable, scalable and easy-to-deploy virtual firewalls. Protect inbound, outbound, and east-west traffic between container trust zones and other workload types in Kubernetes environments — without slowing the speed of development. Power, intelligence, simplicity and versatility for enterprise and service provider deployments. A scalable modular design that enables increased performance as enterprise needs grow.

No-compromise security and high-performance versatility for data centers and service providers. Proactive threat prevention for your distributed enterprise, with simplified security for thousands of branch offices. Visibility, control, and power to prevent network threats in a small form factor. We have so many options for what we can do with all the different solutions Palo Alto Networks offers and how they all work together.