A few years ago, the firewall was an excellent means of promoting cybersecurity. Majority of our daily work took place within the walls of the organization, whether or not via WAN connections for communication with international offices. If you, as an IT manager, were attacked somewhere, then ‘the hotseat’ could be located and brought under control quickly. But the worldwide growth of internet use and the digital revolution changed everything…
Has the firewall seen the best of days?
Extinguishing problems from the wrong direction
Firewalls shaped as physical devices at corporate locations is an outdated architectural concept. If you don’t realize this, you run the risk of serious external threats. A fire source is no longer only a hacker who attacks company networks. Cyber threats appear everywhere in applications and services that we use every day. For example, your organization can suffer damage if company information leaks out via social media. There also exist malicious services that allow employees to send files easily, but in low secured ways. A firewall at your company location does not provide adequate protection against these modern threats. There’s no question of digital security, when it should be the case for a CEO or entrepreneur.
Hassles around expiration dates
Firewalls must be maintained. Managing and providing correct updates in time, takes valuable time. However, due to the increasing number of cyber attacks, firewalls require more and more maintenance. The budget holder often also has the idea that firewalls can last longer than what is justified in terms of security level. Usually this is only a maximum of 3 years.
Not entirely unimportant: working from home requires more access to the company network. All those extra accesses must also be guarded with a firewall. All these factors greatly increase the cost of management. All this because of the old architecture. How could it be otherwise? Remember: protecting one access is always easier than monitoring multiple accesses, especially if that access takes place from uncontrolled locations, such as the remote workplace.
Think from a cloud an mobility perspective
In many cases, doing business these days, does not involve the internal company network. New customer contacts arise outside the network and on the internet itself. More and more services are moving to the cloud in the form of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. This means that the usefulness of the firewalls and the additional management by your IT department continues to decrease. While the associated costs remain or increase.
How can it be done differently?
Integrate digital security into a cloud-based network infrastructure. That’s how it can be. This enables you to apply a zero-trust approach for the entire network including all mobile users, remote workstations and cloud services. Because more and more customer contacts outside the company network also mean that mobile traffic must take place over secure digital roads. A good example of the ‘zero-trust’ approach is as applied by Cato Networks. Stop thinking in of physical firewalls by directing security in a cloud-based solution. Try to be ahead of cyberthreats instead.
Extinguishing fires? Firewall as a service
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