The cloud is redefining the role of the firewall, according to a survey of more than 600 IT professionals conducted by IT security and data protection solutions provider Barracuda Networks.
Key findings from the Barracuda "Firewalls and the Cloud" survey included:
- 96 percent of IT professionals said a cloud-specific firewall is valuable.
- 93 percent have faced challenges with integrating security into development and operations (DevOps), development and security operations (DevSecOps) or continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD).
- 83 percent have concerns about next-generation firewalls (NGFs) in the cloud.
- The top concerns associated with the use of NGFs in the cloud are pricing and licensing, lack of integration and increased overhead due to a lack of centralized management.
- 76 percent expect cloud security to be a shared responsibility.
- 56 percent said their on-premises security is superior to cloud security.
In addition, 99 percent of survey respondents stated they see value in various cloud-specific firewall capabilities, including:
- Integration with cloud-native capabilities (74 percent).
- Ease of deployment and configuration by cloud developers (59 percent).
- Regulating traffic flows between on-premises and cloud environments (56 percent).
- Distributed policy enforcement (53 percent).
Moving to the cloud requires IT professionals to embrace "a new way of thinking" relative to security, Barracuda VP of Public Cloud Tim Jefferson said in a prepared statement. Fortunately, NGFs for public cloud environments have been shown to provide organizations with greater protection than many on-premise security options.
NGFs: Here's What You Need to Know
NGFs provide application-level inspection, intrusion prevention and intelligence from outside a firewall, according to technology research firm Gartner. By doing so, NGFS simultaneously help organizations use applications and limit the impact of cyberattacks.
Some of the benefits of NGFs include:
- Ability to create security policies to ensure only authorized users run sanctioned applications and reduce an organization's cyberattack surface area.
- Advanced security capabilities such as antivirus inspection, sandboxing, SSL inspection and website filtering.
- Visibility into network traffic based on applications, content, devices and end users.
Barracuda offers Cloud Generation Firewalls designed to provide network and application security for cloud-only and hybrid-cloud environments. These firewalls include metered billing, application programming interface (API) support for DevSecOps teams and other cloud-specific features to help organizations align security with their cloud deployments, according to the company.
What Does the Future Hold for NGFs?
The global NGF market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.3 percent between 2017 and 2022, market research firm MarketsandMarkets indicated.
Also, MarketsandMarkets has predicted the global NGF market could be worth nearly $4.3 billion by 2022.
