Hybrid Mesh Firewall

Centralized and unified management is the most critical capability of a hybrid mesh firewall. If separate domains, such as corporate sites, public and private clouds, and remote workers, require protection via separate dashboards, then you don’t have a hybrid mesh firewall.

Centralized management coordinates and unifies these domains into a single enterprise IT security solution—simple, automated protection that extends from corporate sites to the cloud and remote workers. And because different organizations have different requirements for managing their dispersed network firewalls, all form factors of the centralized management must be supported, including appliances, VMs, SaaS, and managed firewall services.

Centralized management also delivers enormous value in bringing network operations center (NOC) and security operations center (SOC) teams together using a single pane of glass to manage and monitor the entire threat attack surface. 

There are always corporate sites in a hybrid mesh firewall deployment, and those sites require appliances that can scale security functions. Corporate sites and on-premises hardware should never be the reason for network bottlenecks.

A good way to avoid network bottlenecks is to deploy on-premises appliances enhanced with application-specific integrated circuits, or ASICs. A security appliance containing a custom ASIC can offload many resource-intensive functions, like firewalling, VPN, IPS, and even SSL or deep packet inspection (DPI). That means your corporate sites are protected with multi-layered security controls without impacting network performance.

The result is happy, secure stakeholders.

Cloud-native firewalls are deployed to protect public cloud application workloads deployed in IaaS environments as infrastructure-as-code. The cloud-native firewall is delivered as a SaaS solution that can simplify cloud network security while implicitly providing availability and scalability to your cloud environment.

Cloud-native firewalls reduce your network security operations workload by eliminating the need to configure, provision, and maintain a firewall software infrastructure, allowing security teams to focus on policy management. Cloud-native firewalls also offer additional protection capabilities, such as egress security, known bad IP address filtering, geo-fencing, and more.

Virtual firewalls are commonly used to protect virtualized environments in software-defined data centers and multi-cloud environments because they are the least expensive and the most portable, enabling users to easily move a virtual firewall from cloud to cloud.

Virtual firewalls within a hybrid mesh firewall solution enable a comprehensive security ecosystem for your software-defined data center, aiding your consolidation process. Virtual firewalls can protect your environment from threats while supporting a variety of cybersecurity services beyond stateful firewalling.

FWaaS is a firewall solution delivered as a cloud-based service that allows companies to simplify and scale their IT infrastructure. It provides next-generation firewall (NGFW) capabilities like web filtering, advanced threat protection (ATP), intrusion prevention system (IPS), and Domain Name System (DNS) security.  

In many ways, FWaaS is much like the hardware firewall that you would deploy on-premises. However, it has distinct advantages, such as the ability to scale nearly instantaneously to suit an expanding network. You can also quickly provision new services that you may have previously not needed. All of this is possible thanks to the fact that FWaaS is based in the cloud. As a result, it can be easily molded according to your network's size, configuration, demand, and unique security needs.

The rapid expansion of network edges has compounded the challenges caused by years of adding disparate point security products to solve one problem after another without regard for an overall security strategy. Disparate solutions cannot work together or share information, making consistent security policy, end-to-end visibility, and automation impossible. Trying to maintain and monitor numerous hybrid, hardware, software, and X-as-a-Service solutions also overburdens security teams.

A single operating system is the foundation of hybrid mesh firewalls, consolidating numerous technologies and use cases into a simplified, single policy and management framework. While its centralized management console unifies the front-end operations of hybrid mesh firewall capabilities, a single operating system ensures that its various deployments, such as appliances, virtual and cloud-native firewalls, and FWaaS agents, can all interoperate on the back end.