The basis of the efficacy of any firewall lies in its ability to identify new threats and fine tune the firewall so the threat ceases. They must also identify new application types and allow system administrators to pick and submit the packet types for analysis by the firewall engineers.
Application awareness of the firewall
The best next generation firewall has new architecture that can several things like identify the user and the device and increase application awareness. The firewall software identifies thousands of applications even if they have different protocol or port. You get an elevated level of application control in the way the administrators now can remove risker portions of the application manually.
The firewall administrator is presented with the information about the bandwidth distribution by the software. He uses this information to adjust the next allocation and use of the software. They can address real time situations and define security policies to cover these situations.
Use the options available
The wider powers of the system administrator help him or her to block the instant messaging’s file sharing capability but leaving the chat facility unaffected. They do this by the application awareness technology which forms the core part of the firewall architecture. You can deploy the next generation firewall in both the virtual and physical manifestation along with the cloud environment deployment.
The company that produces the firewall software identifies the new releases of the applications and conducts inquiries into whether are suitable for adoption or not. If yes, these are added to the signature database. Most of the leading firewall software have a big signature database.
The firewall software should have a real time monitor to keep track of the progress. It should also have a visualisation dashboard through which the administrators see specific applications. This gives the administrator information about who is using which items and the amount of data being consumed for that purpose.
Necessary features in the firewall software
Also, the next generation firewall identifies the different applications and distributes the bandwidth for each of them. This improves the system efficiency and prevents undue crashes. The life of the hardware increases and the working becomes smoother. You can see a few common features in all next generation firewall software. This includes virtual private network, stateful packet inspection, NAT, non-disruptive in bump-in-the-wire configuration, unified threat management, application awareness, and integrated signature-based IPS engine.
They might also have capabilities to use information from outside the firewall. These would include blacklists, directory-based policy, white list, and so on. This helps to get information about security threats and information feeds. The firewall software also can decrypt SSL certificates to identify undesirable encrypted applications.
You need to ask what your requirements are for the system. Check if the pricing is suitable for your budget. Compare the product with the others in the market and find out the good and bad features of each. And lastly, check whether the software is suitable for the business of the size that you have.
The components of the software suite provide good policy enforcement. It allows good scalability and keeps a check on the traffic to the site. They must operate at high speeds across all the platforms.
