Why Today’s Global Businesses Need a Cloud-Delivered Firewall Solution
Solutions Architect for Rahi Systems, Nasib Ali illustrates Global Businesses need for a Cloud-Delivered Firewall Solution.
The firewall remains an essential component of a layered approach to cyber-security. However, routing network traffic through the traditional data centre firewall can create performance and latency issues for employees worldwide who need access to company resources.
A cloud-delivered firewall can relieve these headaches. Mobile and remote users connect to the nearest node on a global cloud network to access the resources they need, whether those resources are hosted in the corporate data centre or on a cloud-based platform. This results in an improved user experience and eliminates the need to use costly MPLS WAN services to back-haul Internet traffic to headquarters.
Firewall-as-a-Service solutions offer other benefits as well. IT teams gain improved visibility into network traffic and end-user devices regardless of location. All firewall services can be maintained through one, browser-based interface, eliminating the time-consuming task of patching, configuring and updating numerous appliances throughout the enterprise. Centralised management also enables IT to define security policies globally and enforce them uniformly across all traffic, locations and users, while retaining the flexibility to tailor policies to meet specific needs.
Here’s a scenario that shows how those features work together. Let’s say that a user in Germany needs access to resources in the company’s San Francisco headquarters. The user is using the Internet connection in a coffee shop and his laptop gets infected with malware. When the user attempts to log into the company VPN via the nearest cloud-delivered firewall node, the firewall will see that the laptop has been compromised and prevent the user from accessing the VPN until the malware has been removed.
From an IT perspective, a cloud-delivered firewall is faster and easier to deploy than traditional on-premises solutions, without going through complex sizing processes to determine the capacity you need. You no longer need to make trade-offs between performance, security and cost, or face a forklift upgrade when capacity requirements increase. An enterprise-class cloud-based firewall can readily scale to serve more users and handle growing volumes of encrypted traffic.
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Some organisations implement firewall services locally in remote locations, but this results in appliance sprawl that complicates management and creates single points of failure across the environment. Other organisations avoid appliances for this reason but allowing users to access the Internet directly introduces significant security risks. With Firewall-as-a-Service, you can eliminate the need for distributed hardware appliances and gain a single, global, logical firewall that is device- and application-aware.
Many businesses today are global, with remote and mobile employees scattered all over the world. Those users need secure access to company resources that are hosted in the data centre and on cloud-based platforms. The traditional on-premises firewall is ill-suited to these requirements and does not provide the network-wide visibility and centralised policy management IT teams need to ensure robust security.
A cloud-based, Firewall-as-a-Service solution overcomes these drawbacks and eliminates the burden of managing and maintaining hardware appliances.
