A Firewall as a Service is a type of cloud firewall. Conventional firewall appliances are hosted within the data center or branch office of an organization. Cloud firewalls, on the other hand, are software-based and hosted at a third-party location. However, cloud firewalls serve the same purpose as other firewalls, which is to prevent unlawful access to data and private networks.

Firewall as a Service is a next-generation cloud firewall that delivers advanced capabilities such as

-      Access controls

-      Advanced threat prevention

-      URL filtering

-      DNS Security, and

-      Intrusion prevention systems

FWaaS enables organizations to simplify their IT infrastructure by eliminating firewall appliances. Since it can be centrally managed from a single console, it eliminates the challenges involving change control. It also eliminates other issues such as patch management, policy management, and coordinating outage windows with firewall appliances.

Why do companies need FWaaS?

Earlier companies kept their data in onsite data centers. Hence, they needed on-premises firewall appliances as the primary access point.

Nowadays more and more companies are adopting cloud services. Cloud computing services such as PaaS and IaaS helped add more mobile devices to their networks. Companies are now using data and applications hosted on third-party infrastructure. They no longer have clearly defined network perimeters.

However, as more data and applications began running on third-party infrastructure, the lack of visibility and control became big issues. Companies realized that they could not rely solely on their cloud service providers to oversee the security of their data. This led to companies rethinking their security approach.

Companies can now use FWaaS to deliver network security and firewall capabilities to their cloud infrastructure. With FWaaS companies can aggregate traffic coming from multiple sources, such as data centers, mobile users, and branch offices, into the cloud. They can consistently enforce security policies across all locations, and gain visibility into the control over their networks, without the need for any physical appliances.

Trends that could drive FWaaS adoption in 2021

FWaaS has numerous benefits and more and more companies are adopting it as time goes by. Here are three trends that could drive FWaaS adoption in 2021:

1. More companies are moving to the cloud and Work from Home culture is becoming popular.

Global Workplace Analytics forecasts that nearly 30% of the workforce will be working from home, many times a week. User spending on cloud services increased by 59% between 2018 and 2020.

2. The need for software-based security solutions has increased.

With increased cloud adoption, the need for software-based security solutions has also increased. The growing need for easy-to-consume and scalable solutions has increased the adoption of FWaaS solutions.

3. The need for easy-to-use and scalable solutions is increasing.

FWaaS is quite simple to configure and easy to get started with. Even smaller organizations that are not very familiar with the cloud can also implement FWaaS easily.

When evaluating different FWaaS solutions, organizations should ensure that they support both cloud and mobile networks. Also, customers should be able to create isolated and dedicated cloud environments on their network with a single management console.

Source : Techsense Team