What Is Firewall As A Service?

Firewall as a service (FWaaS) refers to a cloud firewall that delivers advanced Layer 7/next-generation firewall (NGFW) capabilities, which includes access controls like URL filtering, advanced threat protection, intrusion prevention systems (IPS) and DNS security. The concept of FWaaS is not just about virtualizing appliances. It allows organizations to remove firewall appliances and streamline their IT infrastructure. As a provider of firewall services, RHYNO Networks believes there is always more work to be done for enhancing the privacy and security of your organization, especially during these times of rampant cyber threats. Let’s address the question on everyone’s mind–What is firewall as a service?

What’s Wrong With Physical Firewall Appliances?

There actually isn’t anything wrong with physical firewalls. They are still prominent, particularly for organizations with a lot of locations and very few remote workers. They even have some advantages over FWaaS, such as varying cost profiles. Firewalls that are on-site tend to be cheaper over time, and have lower latency. If your business wants to stick with these firewall services, that is totally fine! But for other businesses who have a robust workforce that is mostly remote and requires secure protection at all times, FWaaS may be the way to go.

The Rise Of FWaaS

The pandemic truly shifted the model of many businesses. Many were accustomed to handling most of the operations in-house, but the pandemonium had different plans. As such, the shift towards a remote model began to take full effect and for a vast majority of companies, this model will continue to stay in place. FWaaS is capable of protecting connections coming from anywhere, whether it’s a branch office or even a remote worker’s study. It’s estimated that FWaaS will soar from a $251 million industry to about $2.6 billion by 2025, this is based on estimates from Gartner. This would give FWaaS a 21% share of the $12 billion dollar firewall industry in less than five years time. Much of the growth has occurred in North America and Europe.

How Are These Firewall Services Deployed?

Since FWaaS is a cloud-based solution, it’s much easier to deploy in comparison to hardware appliances that are used in a multitude of branch offices. FWaaS can be deployed in conjunction with SD-WAN, making it so that every appliance includes integrated security. With this, traffic can be routed directly to its destination without compromising network security and visibility. For organizations to properly implement this, they need to be privy to the kind of access that is required at each branch before configuring the firewall. Mind you, it’s nowhere near as complex as setting up thousands of physical firewalls.

How Does FWaaS Work?

FWaaS does precisely the same thing as an on-site firewall, just in a remote capacity. It’s achieved from a physical point of preference or from anywhere in the cloud. The exact location of where the firewall workload happens varies from vendor to vendor.

Everything Is Better In The Cloud

Cloud FWaaS allows businesses to create secure local breakouts for all applications. Security capabilities, including a full Layer 7 firewall, are delivered as a cloud service that scales to handle SSL inspection, grow bandwidth and user demands, and cloud application traffic with long-established connections. With the ability to manage your systems from a single console, it’s simple to deliver protection for any user, on any device, regardless of where they connect.

Additional benefits of these cloud firewall services include the following:

• Proxy-Based Architecture: Inspects traffic for all users, applications, devices, and locations. It natively inspects SSL/TLS traffic, at scale, for detecting malware that’s hidden in encrypted traffic. It enables granular firewall policies that span across many layers based on cloud app, network app, domain name (FQDN), and URL. Proxy-Based Architecture is needed to stop the advanced threat’s of today.

• Cloud IPS: A cloud-based intrusion prevention system (IPS) always deliver on threat protection and coverage. It combs through all user traffic on and off network, in hopes of restoring full visibility into user, app, and internet connections.

• DNS Security And Control: As one of your first line’s of defense, a cloud-based firewall will prevent users from interacting with malicious domains. It optimizes DNS resolutions to enhance the user experience and cloud application performance (which is especially useful for CDN-based apps). Granular controls are also equipped to identify and prevent DNS tunneling.

• Visibility And Simplified Management: This seeks to deliver real-time visibility, control, and immediate policy enforcement across the platform. It will log every session in full detail, using advanced analytics to correlate events, shed light on threats and weak points for all users, applications, and locations. 

Upgrade Your Firewall Services With RHYNO Networks

We hope that you are taking proactive measures to protect the infrastructure of your organization. RHYNO Networks will help you upgrade your firewall services. To finalize your involvement, contact our team today!