Three Critical Elements to Modernize Your Network Firewalls

The new requirements for network security

By Carolyn Raab, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer, Corsa Security

It is often assumed that the security team will protect the organization regardless of any new digital initiative the organization adopts. However, most legacy security infrastructure is simply not designed to easily adjust across new technologies. And these new technologies are being adopted at an alarming rate. Statista estimates that the global investment in digital transformation is expected to almost double between the years 2022 from 1.8 trillion U.S. dollars to 2.8 trillion U.S. dollars in 2025.

Alongside the rapid adoption of digital initiatives, new security threats are constantly being introduced. Cybersecurity threats have grown more advanced, and simple endpoint attacks have become complex. These new threats are coming through things like third-party exposure, configuration mistakes, cloud vulnerabilities, and the Internet of Things. IBM reports that cloud vulnerabilities have increased 150% in the last five years.

As a result of these new realities, network security leaders are being forced to modernize their architectures in order to adequately respond to these increased risks and the requirements of these new initiatives.Security teams have to be able to scale threat protection against an ever-expanding attack surface but do it in a way that is easier, quicker and more flexible than has been possible with fixed, physical, hardware-based solutions.

The new requirements for network security

As the transition to digital business speeds up, network security professionals are recognizing that traditional network firewalls—a foundational piece of any security architecture—need a different approach. Network security now needs to be:

• Agile so you can keep network security in sync with the pace of digital business acceleration.
• Flexible so you can deploy in different scenarios (public, private, hybrid cloud) and extend security outside the organization as needed.
• Scalable so you can upsize or downsize the security services as needed or add new ones quickly.

As network security transitions to satisfy these requirements, there are three core factors needed to ensure the new infrastructure is agile, flexible, and scalable.

Three Critical Elements to Modernize Network Security

It is tempting to make a broad statement like ‘move everything to the cloud’ and then believe your infrastructure is modernized. The reality is that the private network remains important to most organizations and it needs to be maintained. In that context, to modernize network security architectures, leading organizations need to keep their on-premise firewalls but virtualize them in order to address these new security challenges of the private network. Let’s look at the three key elements which will increase your private network threat protection while also delivering speed, simplicity and savings.

1. Virtualization

Today’s network firewalls need all the benefits of what have traditionally only been possible with physical firewalls, but with the added flexibility of virtualization. Virtualization removes the complexity, cost and risk of hardware deployments, while simplifying network architecture for the enterprise. When you virtualize you gain:

• Scalability: you can easily and quickly increase inspection capacity in line with day-to-day changes.
• Agility: the flexibility to add capacity with the push of a button.
• Flexible deployment: you can support a range of deployments from on-premises to hybrid (on-premises and cloud) and public to private cloud.
• Low cost of entry: if you pay-as-you-grow with a subscription model, you are moving your expenses from CAPEX to OPEX and only paying for what you need.

2. Automation

If we are to virtualize our network security in order to make the most of the flexibility it offers, we face a huge engineering task. DIY virtualization requires specialist engineering knowledge and a large time commitment. The main stages of such a virtualization project include:

• configuration and optimization of hypervisor software;
• bootstrapping and initial configuration of NGFW VMs;
• integration of licensing from firewall vendors;
• health check mechanisms;
• maintenance of the platform.

Looked at like this, virtualization seems a bridge too far. Until we consider automation. When any task is automated we gain speed, scalability and reliability. Automation simplifies workflows and improves uniformity and accuracy. The same applies to our network security; when automation is implemented we’ll begin to see:

• Simpler, centralized, more user-friendly management of operations.
• Faster delivery of new services and capabilities.
• Dynamic, rapid changes to network firewall capacity.

3. Orchestration

Converting physical firewalls to virtual ones is a challenge. Automation is key to smoothing the way, but DevOps and DevSecOps still demand a high level of expertise and investment. What really makes the difference is intelligent orchestration. Orchestration allows your processes to run without manual intervention by initiating the right workflows, with the right parameters, at the right time, and highlighting the relevant information on which to take action. It’s a powerful tool which allows you to visualize and control your virtual network firewalls across all on-premise environments, including:

• Simplifies complex operations: it automates the full lifecycle of on‑premise virtual firewalls from deploy to scale to optimize. It becomes simple to add new virtual firewalls, adjust existing ones, re-allocate server or firewall resources, and adjust CPU or memory resources without the need for any DevOps work.
• Optimizes resource allocation: it scales virtual firewall performance for both throughput and security. You get a constantly updated snapshot of resource utilization. The “intelligent” in intelligent orchestration refers to how it doesn’t just show you what you need to do, it does what you need it to do, based on your environments’ needs.
• Aggregates the views of all the systems: it shows you the overall health of the system, server resource allocation, VMs and network utilization. The availability of all resources is viewed as a whole. There is a single pane of glass with a simple interface, giving end-to-end visibility and control from one console. This enables IT teams to automate tasks across multiple platforms, making your team more nimble when responding to change.

Speed, Simplicity, Savings

The trio of virtualization, automation and orchestration is what will enable your network security to keep pace with digital business acceleration. These elements deliver the speed and simplicity you need in your network firewalls, as well as the savings to be able to afford the constant changes. Integrating virtualization with automation and intelligent orchestration allows you to operate at cloud speed, getting 24x faster time to deployment. You can manage the health, capacity and performance of on-premise virtual firewalls with the simplicity of a single UI and zero‑touch operations. Plus, you eliminate the up-front CAPEX of physical firewalls and DevOps with savings of over 78% and almost 9x lower TCO when you forgo DIY. Network security teams can achieve the scaling they need in order to provide effective threat protection from ever-evolving attacks in an ever-expanding surface, they just need to modernize firewalls in the right manner.

You can find out more in the Video Series: Virtualize Your Network Firewalls to Increase Business Agility.

About the Author

Carolyn Raab is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Corsa Security where she is responsible for technology vision, product management and marketing. A networking and security expert, Carolyn is focused on successfully bringing innovative products to market. Her proven track record is built on the ability to predict intercept points in the market where an important shift is taking place and a new solution offering will be most relevant.

Carolyn can be reached online at https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolyn-raab/ and at our company website https://www.corsa.com/