How The Firewall Appliance Continues to Grow and Change

The firewall business continues to expand. In late August, the Dell’Oro Group released a report indicating that during the second quarter enterprise class firewalls sales rose more than 10 percent against the year-ago quarter. They almost reached the $1 billion mark. Unified Threat Mangement devices optimized for edge applications grew significantly as well.

The category is changing as well. This very nicely done story at Computerworld does a few things simultaneously. It illustrates how the next generation in-line Unified Threat Management Device technology confronts threats – not just reports upon them. It clearly describes how necessary these hardware and software devices are and it shows that folks who don’t accept and adjust to new things end up paying a price.

The idea is that the writer – Mathias Thurman, a corporate security manager -- deployed a loaner in-line firewall (from Palo Alto Networks). The IT department balked at deploying the in-line features, meaning that they ended up with new equipment that they used as if it was old. Thurman didn’t merely order them to (he could have) but led them to understand how much they were missing. He does a nice job describing how he made the IT staff see the difference between the new and old UTM technology.

Essentially, this new approach to Unified Threat Management Device technology is to not stop at reporting suspicious activity. They react by proactively denying access when suspicious activity occurs. The passive versus active distinction is an important one. What is even more important, perhaps, is to remember that IT people are human and may need to be pushed to try new things. 

That’s not the only way Unified Threat Managment technology is changing. It is, for instance, a key early use of network functions virtualization (NFV), in which generic servers host Unified Threat Management Device software. This provides network managers with a tremendous amount of flexibility – but will be a challenge to vendors.

The Dell’Oro study says that Cisco controls 40 percent of the UTM segment. The company offers Cisco Meraki cloud-based Unified Threat Management appliances, which feature layer 7-aware stateful inspection capabilities; per-application UTM and bandwidth settings; content search and search filtering; Web caching; intelligent WAN management, SNORT-based intrusion detection and prevention and 4G wireless failover.

Meraki firewalls are managed through the Meraki dashboard (cloud based) and connect all Meraki hardware. This forms a self-policing, self-healing network fabric. Cloud licenses for various periods – 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 years – can be purchased.

For more information on Meraki Firewalls, contact us today!