The concept of FWaaS isn’t about simply virtualizing a network firewall appliance. FWaaS enables organizations to eliminate firewall appliances, simplify their IT infrastructure, and improve cybersecurity overall. With FWaaS, management is centralized from a single console, eliminating the challenges of change control, patch management, coordinating outage windows, and policy management associated with NGFW appliances while helping organizations deliver consistent policies, wherever users connect.
How Is FWaaS Different from a Regular Firewall?
Traditional on-premises firewalls were designed and programmed to inspect network traffic for corporate offices. As the name suggests, FWaaS is delivered via the cloud; the main difference between the two is that on-premises firewalls struggle to scale and adapt to changing network demands and an evolving threat landscape. Because FWaaS is cloud native, it can do both, giving organizations a much more useful tool for securing data, keeping endpoints safe, and carrying out thorough security inspections.
Back when business happened in the office, traditional firewalls offered adequate network security. Because the scope of threats was limited to corporate offices—where employees were 99% of the time—there was no need for security and IT teams to extend a firewall’s services beyond its installation site.
Today, more and more organizations leverage cloud services such as SaaS, and with endpoints everywhere and new threats arising, firewalls can’t sit in the data center anymore. They must live in the cloud and scale to protect resources and employees everywhere.
