Michael Vett, Sophos: More and more companies are moving resources and infrastructure to the cloud. Traditional firewalls have reached their limits.
“The current evolution of the modern workplace marks the fusion of traditional and cloud environments in a world where hybrid security infrastructure use cases will dominate the future of network security. This is where SASE approaches can offer organizations the ultimate in flexibility to interact and operate on both sides of the scale as the transition progresses to This new world of work.
Migrating to the cloud exposes the limitations of firewalls
The result of the current development is that more and more companies are moving resources and infrastructure to the cloud. This migration demonstrated the limitations of traditional firewalls, which can no longer meet the security challenges inherent in hybrid and virtual environments. This results in two of the most important requirements and characteristics that a future network firewall must meet:
- Dispersed management and control level management, where command and control of firewall functions can be flexibly maintained in more “traditional” perimeter use cases, while also adopting an applicable policy architecture in the cloud. So technology that can ensure across both types of deployment and use cases that the customer experience and therefore adoption of the new approach will be positive.
- The scalability of the processing data layer should also be a major factor. The local deployment that is still needed requires things like SD-WAN, internal security handling, and connectivity — but it also needs the ability to handle faster speeds than before due to upgrades in communication infrastructures like 5G. Whereas, cloud-deployed firewalls must adapt to the increase in processing requests as users become more mobile and connect to the Internet across different time zones. Therefore, the level of data that works for both scenarios while providing a similar user experience is also important.
Firewalls as a Service
As a result of this development, we will see more and more services such as Secure Web Access, Zero Trust Network Access and SAAS Access Security – and they will become a mainstay for businesses because they are convenient for customers and will soon be familiar. A closer look at these services shows that they are primarily concerned with accessing public websites and public/private applications. The next natural progression for these offerings now would be to send all traffic and data to these services. It creates a natural place to add firewalls as a service as a show. While large companies have so far mainly used these platforms, the offerings are now available at a better rate of performance than ever before and thus they are also of interest to small and medium business customers. In this way, we will eventually see a bigger and bigger shift from internal firewalls to SASE platforms.
However, firewalls will always have a place in the zero-trust model unless we believe that all forms of networks no longer exist and that the connections between networks are actually disintegrating. At the moment, the situation of the ocean is an increasingly important factor for organizations – but this transformation will not happen overnight. The flexible SASE model can score points, including firewalls of various shapes, and thus work coherently with zero-trust principles, given these uncertainties in a hybrid working world. The possibilities are endless here.”
“More and more companies are moving resources and infrastructure to the cloud. This migration has exposed the limitations of traditional firewalls, which are no longer able to meet the security challenges inherent in hybrid and virtual environments.”