Your enterprise firewall is the foundation of data security for your business network. In fact, your business has its unique requirements, risks, and data flow. Hence, you cannot do with just any firewall. All you need is advanced threat protection from data breaches and multiple cyber threats.
However, given the sheer number of options available in the market, you must choose the best enterprise firewall that suits your business requirements. In fact, you must factor in your use cases, management requirements, scalability, and relevant security aspects.
Read more to know how to choose the best enterprise firewall for your business network.
What Is an Enterprise Firewall?
Essentially, an enterprise firewall might be a physical device or software. It helps to monitor and control network traffic (both incoming and outgoing). However, you must configure the firewall according to the security rules of your business network.
Thereby, you can prevent unauthorized access to your network. This will help you to secure your business data from cyber threats. Moreover, you can also restrict access from your network.
A basic personal firewall merely protects your individual device. Meanwhile, an enterprise firewall helps protect your complex business network. Hence, it comes with strong security features. As a result, you get the chance to grow your business to scale.
Primarily, an enterprise firewall does the following things:
- Filters traffic using IP addresses, protocols, content, and ports.
- Implements intrusion detection (IDS) and prevention systems (IPS).
- Does antivirus scanning.
- Filters traffic at the network application layer.
These factors demonstrate why it is essential to implement an enterprise firewall for your business network. But before that, you must choose the right one that suits your business network requirements and your goals.
Mistakes to Avoid While Choosing an Enterprise Firewall
Before selecting a next generation enterprise firewall for your network environment, you must test it. In fact, test it using your traffic and data. This way, you will understand whether the particular firewall is right for your enterprise network or not.
The following are some of the major mistakes you must avoid when you choose an enterprise firewall for your business network:
1. Looking at Only the Features and Offerings
When comparing different enterprise firewalls, do not rely solely on features and offerings. This is because the options vary among firewall providers.
For example, one firewall provider might evaluate performance to measure IPS, antivirus, and traffic filtering. Meanwhile, another firewall provider might focus solely on IPS to assess performance.
Hence, it is essential to gain a better knowledge of your enterprise network’s traffic mix and real-world requirements. This way, you will be able to check the performance impact of the firewall if you enable more features in the future.
Obviously, you do not want to compromise your performance for a security feature. Hence, avoid those trade-offs. Therefore, it is necessary to gain a broader perspective when factoring in your enterprise perimeter security.
2. Not Looking at Different Requirements
Your business network comprises multiple teams and departments. Hence, you must also factor in their requirements while choosing an enterprise data center firewall. The following are the major requirements of various teams within your network:
- Networking teams: Require easy integration, ease of usage, performance, and fast uptime.
- Security teams: They look for seamless integration, strong security features, and threat prevention through detection and response capabilities.
- Security operations teams: They prefer single-pane management, automated security, and overall capabilities.
- Data center teams: They require automated features, segmentation of hybrid cloud environments, single-pane management, and scalability features.
- Application teams: They are looking for fast and secure application development and implementation.
Hence, if you only look at the requirements of your networking teams, you will make a huge mistake. This way, you might affect the performance of other teams.
Therefore, when choosing an enterprise firewall, take input from all these teams. Thereby, you will be able to get the bigger picture of your network requirements.
3. Focusing Solely on Roadmap Features
Many enterprise firewall providers will promise you future roadmap features. It will be risky if you purchase a firewall solely based on this promise. This is because of the following reasons:
- The probability of timeline slip is high. This will obviously affect your projects, initiatives, innovation, and development.
- These promises do not guarantee the stability, functionality, and maturity of features. In general, these events happen after extensive testing.
- You may even have to upgrade your OS version to ensure those new features work properly on your firewalls and management devices. Hence, these complexities surely outweigh the benefits.
Therefore, you must look at past behavior to check whether a particular roadmap will work for your enterprise network or not. Always choose a trusted and tested enterprise firewall platform. This way, you can ensure the essential features are available at the time of purchase.
Moreover, choose an enterprise firewall platform that comes with frequent updates and innovations. Furthermore, they must also provide detailed threat info, data analysis, and signatures. Basically, you must aim to improve security checks for your network.
4. Failing to Look at Integration and Scalability
If a firewall does not come with easy integration, it is not worth it. This is because it is not significantly improving your IT infrastructure. Do not choose an enterprise firewall platform that compels you to replace your other infrastructure components for easy integration.
Even if you migrate to a single vendor, you might still face management issues and complexities. Hence, always avoid the trick that firewall providers use to lock you into their services. Rather, choose a firewall provider with multiple technology partners. This way, you can ensure easy integration.
Meanwhile, you must also look at your scalability requirements for your business. Hence, choose an enterprise firewall provider that works on cloud architecture. This gives you the chance to scale your business faster. Also, you do not have to update your hardware and storage systems frequently.
Additionally, the on-demand nature of the cloud is also advantageous for your business. This is because it offers better performance, quick access, and more agility. As a result, it will be easier for you to make your network compatible with future technology.
Why You Must Choose Sangfor’s Athena NGFW Enterprise Firewall?
By choosing Sangfor’s Athena Firewall, you can avoid the above mistakes. The Athena Next Generation Firewall is an all-in-one firewall solution for business networks. It comes with a user-friendly management platform that integrates real-time threat intelligence, deep packet inspection (DPI), and intrusion detection and prevention.
The following are the major features:
- AI-powered network detection and response – for better network traffic analysis and automated response.
- Advanced DPI, IDS, and IPS capabilities.
- Access to real-time threat intelligence.
- Simple monitoring options through centralized management.
- Easy scalability options (and cloud features) for businesses of all sizes.
Hence, if you want robust security features and easy scalability, Sangfor’s Firewall is the best choice. Not only can you secure your network from multiple cyber threats, but you can also meet the scalability and flexibility you need to excel your business capabilities intelligently.
So, choose wisely!