Sourcefire Unveils What a Next-Generation Firewall Should Be

Let’s put it out there. For the last several years, Sourcefire has heavily focused on the network security appliance market, namely with our Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention Systems (NGIPS). We’ve watched the growth – and fits and starts – of the Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) market and we’ve heard what our customers have had to say about both. For many customers, they were interested in the shift into NGFW for the promise of application control. But, for most, they were hesitant to make such a shift due to performance and quality of protection. Existing solutions merely cobble together inferior components to traditional firewalls and force trade-offs between control and prevention. They have bolted on signature-only IDS, unaided by any form of contextual awareness to optimize enforcement decisions. So, for our customers, and those other companies who demand agility in their security infrastructure, we today introduce the Sourcefire Next-Generation Firewall.

Built on our core competencies of context-aware and adaptive security solutions, fueled by our FirePOWER performance platform and sophisticated FireSIGHT intelligence, we deliver a universal security platform that isn’t just a firewall. It isn’t just a NGIPS. It can be exactly what our customers need it to be. It’s exactly what a next-generation firewall should be.

Our solution is built on a highly dynamic single-pass engine that can be a NGFW, a NGIPS, or a NGIPS with application control. We understand that customers, especially large organizations, need flexibility and scalability in their organizations – and that doesn’t just come down to speeds and feeds. This comes down to real business decisions that rely on total network visibility, control without compromise, and intelligent security automation. This is what I envisioned several years ago. And this is what my team has built and delivered today. Choice coupled with the most effective threat prevention in the industry.

As threats continue to advance and IT environments continue to evolve, so too must our network security defenses. Back in 2003, I realized that intrusion prevention systems needed to evolve to provide effective protection in the face of dynamically changing environments. A NGFW has to do the very same thing. This is what a next-generation firewall should be. This is what is missing from other existing solutions. No other NGFW, or IPS system for that matter, can come close to this level of awareness, automation and threat protection.

Many security professionals agree that threat prevention is paramount for NGFW solutions. This message is not intended to downplay the firewall component at all – a NGFW must have a low-latency firewall. But how important, and, at what cost? A recent Ponemon Institute study of NGFW implementations across 15 industries found that threat prevention was ranked as the most important feature of their NGFW for data protection, but the firewall ranked as least important. This tells us that confidence is waning in these bolted-together NGFW solutions.

Companies want true integration – at the engine level – so that they are able to have the confidence in both their performance and their protection, and let their firewall be a firewall, while their IPS does what it is supposed to do. They want a universal security platform. The Ponemon Institute survey validates that current NGFW technologies need to evolve in order to be truly context-aware security platforms that provide effective data protection.

As organizations strive to protect their IT environments from increasingly sophisticated attackers, it’s only natural to seek out next-generation security technology. The trick is to find solutions that are next-generation through and through. We offer the choice, the network visibility, the automation, and the best threat prevention.

We offer exactly what a next-generation firewall should be.

For more information visit http://www.sourcefire.com/ngfw.