Natilik and Cisco believe you need to make sure you’re asking 5 key questions before investing in any solution:
1. Will it prevent attacks and quickly detect malware if it gets inside?
The first job of any firewall is to prevent breaches and keep your organisation safe. However, since any preventative measure will never be 100% effective, your firewall should have advanced capabilities that can quickly detect advanced malware before it manages to evade your front-line defences. Your business needs to invest in a firewall that provides you with:
- Prevention to stop attacks before they get inside
- A best-of-breed Next-Generation IPS built-in to spot threats and stop them fast
- URL filtering
- Built-in sandboxing and advanced malware protection that continuously analyses file behaviour to quickly detect and eliminate threats
- A world-class threat intelligence organisation and an expert partner who provide the firewall with the latest intelligence to stop emerging threats
2. Will it provide me with comprehensive visibility of my network?
If your business can’t see the threats it’s facing, how will it be able to protect itself? You always need to be able to monitor your network, so you can spot irregular behaviour and stop it before it has a devastating effect. Your firewall should provide you will a holistic view of all activity on your network, and full contextual awareness to see:
- Threat activity across users, hosts, networks, and devices
- Where and when a threat originated, where else it has been across your extended network, and how it’s behaving now
- Active applications and websites
- Communications between virtual machines, file transfers, and more
3. Does it have flexible management and deployment options?
Whether you are a small to medium-sized business, or a large enterprise, your firewall should be able to meet your unique and ever-changing requirements.
- Management for every use case – choose from an on-box manager or centralized management across all appliances
- Deploy on-premises or in the cloud via a virtual firewall
- Customise with features that meet your needs – simply turn on subscriptions to get advanced capabilities
- Choose from a wide range of throughput speeds
4. Does it accelerate malware detection to mitigate risk?
The current industry standard time from a threat entering a network to detection is 100-200 days! This is far too long. The solution your business chooses should be able to:
- Detect threats within seconds
- Detect the presence of a successful breach within minutes
- Prioritise alerts so you can take precise action to eliminate the key threats you’re currently facing
- Make your life easier by deploying a consistent and easy to maintain policy, which is automatically enforced across the different facets of your organisation.
5. Can it be easily integrated to fit in with my existing security architecture?
Your next-generation firewall should not be a siloed tool and needs to communicate and work together with the rest of your security architecture. You need to choose a firewall that:
- Seamlessly integrates with other tools from the same vendor
- Automatically shares threat information, event data, policy, and contextual information with email, web, endpoint, and network security tools
- Automates security tasks like impact assessment, policy tuning, and user identification
Our Security specialists can evaluate your existing Firewall and Network Protection solutions to identify potential gaps and vulnerabilities in your organisation’s security. We can advise on the best route for you to migrate to a Next Generation Firewall Solution, whether you’re replacing an existing Firewall, or looking to build one into your existing security architecture.
If you’re interested in locating the best NGFW, then get in touch with your Account Director or contact us to hear back from one of our security specialists (and don’t forget to ask those key questions!)
