Why Your Business Needs More Than A Basic Firewall: The Rise of Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) 

Unfortunately, one of the less glamorous parts of running a business today is dealing with a never-ending onslaught of cybersecurity threats.

It seems like every week there’s another story of some company getting hacked and facing disastrous consequences. You wouldn’t be alone if you’ve lost sleep wondering if your corporate network could be the next target, or if you have, in fact, already been hacked and had to go into recovery mode.  

 The uncomfortable truth is that the costs of a breach include far more than just cleaning up the technical mess – it can mean permanently losing customers and ruining your hard-earned reputation seemingly overnight. 

Still, far too many businesses overlook this threat and still rely on woefully inadequate basic firewalls as their main line of defense.

For the hackers that have already moved on to vastly more sophisticated tech, these old school firewalls are likely childs play when it comes to how easy it is to bypass them with modern cyber attacks.  

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The good news is that next generation firewalls (NGFWs) are here to help turn the tide in this constant battle against the hackers – and the added bonus is that they bring more benefits to the table than just added security.  

The Not-So-Reliable Legacy Firewalls No Longer Cut It

Legacy firewalls have been around since the early days of the Internet, when online threats were still fairly basic and limited.

The problem is, those legacy firewalls were designed for that old landscape where threats were way less sophisticated.

Today, their limitations have made them downright dangerous to rely on: 

• Can Only Perform Basic Filtering: These firewalls look at traffic and try to block threats based on very limited criteria like ports, protocols, IP addresses. But hackers easily bypass them using tricks like hiding malware in allowed applications or encrypted tunnels. Legacy firewalls are essentially blind to these techniques.
   
• They’re Blind to What’s Inside Encrypted Traffic: Most traffic today is encrypted. As such, basic firewalls can’t inspect that traffic so they have utterly no idea if malicious packets are hiding inside. In other words, hackers are using encryption to their advantage specifically to conceal attacks, and legacy firewalls are powerless to stop it.
   
• React Too Slowly Against New Threats: Those old firewalls rely on pre-set rules and signatures. If they don’t recognize the specifics of a given attack, you’ve likely already been infected. Legacy firewalls simply can’t keep up with the explosive growth in new threat variants that come out daily.
   
• Zero Visibility into Network Activity: Once an attack starts spreading within your network, basic firewalls provide barely any insight or forensic details to figure out how it infiltrated or what it touched. So you’re left flying blind when trying to assess total damage.

NGFWs To The Rescue

NGFWs hit the market specifically to solve the exact shortcomings of those old legacy firewall models. These updated solutions are leaps and bounds better suited for today’s threat landscape with their locked-and-loaded security capabilities including: 

• Deeper Inspection into Traffic: NGFWs perform exhaustive packet inspection,  scanning, and analysis of all network traffic – including drilling into encrypted communications. This grants unmatched visibility across the full spectrum of potential threat vectors including risky apps, web traffic, infected devices, and beyond. 
   
• Stops Attacks Before They Happen: Rather than just blindly following static rules and signatures, next-gen firewalls incorporate predictive techniques like machine learning, behavioral analysis, and real-time threat intelligence to identify and immediately block emerging zero-day threats before damage can be done. This shifts security from reactively chasing threats to proactively eliminating them.
   
• Unified Security Platform: Modern NGFWs consolidate other critical security tools like IDS/IPS, anti-malware, sandboxing, VPN, and content filtering all within one solution. This eliminates complex piecemeal security stacks in favor of a powerful all-in-one protection system.

With these advanced capabilities, NGFWs overcome legacy design flaws to effectively handle contemporary sophisticated, stealthy threats targeting today’s cloud-centric networks. Time to retire those old firewalls for good! 

Plenty More Reasons You Need A Next-Gen Firewall

Beyond much stronger threat prevention, upgrading to an NGFW solution provides some other nice benefits: 

• Increased Productivity and Access: With user-based access controls plus fine-grained traffic shaping, NGFWs allow employees access to time-saving cloud apps and business-critical tools without performance slowdowns or distraction from unproductive sites.
   
• Major Cost Savings: By proactively stopping attacks before they penetrate your network, next-gen firewalls help avoid pricey recovery costs related to outages, system downtime, data loss or other breach damage. Protection up front saves more resources over paying for fixes down the road.
   
• Regulatory Compliance Assurance: For businesses in regulated industries like finance, healthcare, retail, and more, NGFWs have all the advanced controls needed to comply with strict data privacy, transparency and security regulations. 

Finding The Right Next-Gen Firewall

Okay, so hopefully you are convinced that trying to survive on legacy firewalls alone is an exercise in futility given today’s threat climate.

Upgrading to a modern NGFW is truly imperative for any business that values its operational continuity and data security. But of course, not all NGFWs are created equal. Here are a few things to keep in mind if you do decide to invest in one: 

• Capacity and Scale – How much bandwidth, how many concurrent devices/users will this NGFW need to handle as your business grows?
   
• Deployment Flexibility – Appliance, virtual machine, cloud-based or some mix of the above? The firewall deployment model should align cleanly with your existing on-prem vs cloud infrastructure and workloads.
   
• Threat Detection & Response – Must-have capabilities include behavioral monitoring, deception tools, AI/machine learning, adversity emulation. As threats constantly evolve, the platform must evolve its detection efficacy in kind.
   
• Ongoing Support & Maintenance – Vendors should provide a clear roadmap for keeping the NGFW updated with security service enhancements as new attack techniques emerge.  

While more advanced NGFWs may require greater upfront investment compared to basic legacy firewalls, the sheer risk mitigation value more than makes up for that cost when faced with today’s cyber threat realities. 

Final Word

Legacy firewalls are no longer sufficient as the sole line of defense for businesses. Their limited traffic filtering, inability to inspect encryption, reactive signatures, and lack of network visibility together create security gaps that modern cyber threats exploit with impunity.

Next-generation firewalls resolve these deficiencies through complete traffic scanning, proactive prevention via machine learning, unified security stacks, and other advanced techniques purpose-built for today’s distributed, cloud-centric environments. 

While more costly upfront than basic firewalls, NGFWs provide indispensable protection when accounting for financial, operational and reputational risk from breaches.