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:
In addition, 99 percent of survey respondents stated they see value in various cloud-specific firewall capabilities, including:
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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).
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.
