Firewalls, though an older security technology, still have a role as a foundational element of network security infrastructure, both today and in the future.
That’s the assessment from FireMon’s State of the Firewall 2014 Report, based on a survey of over 700 network security practitioners.
The study reveals that firewalls remain highly strategic to organizations’ current and future security strategies—with an overwhelming 92% of respondents indicating that firewalls will stand as a “critical” component of their security infrastructures over the next five years.
“Previous observations that the ‘firewall is dead’ were clearly premature or overstated,” said Jody Brazil, CEO of FireMon, in a statement. “Not only do today’s practitioners consider the firewall as critical an element of their network security strategy as ever, but they also see a crucial role for the firewall within evolving paradigms including the cloud and SDN, which may surprise some industry watchers.”
A majority (88%) of respondents indicated that they have already deployed next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), with 12% indicating that NGFWs already account for over half their existing systems. Respondents also indicated that traditional or NGFW devices play a valuable role in securing virtualized environments (87%) and cloud-based computing platforms (58%).
Interestingly, on the whole, respondents cited API integration capabilities as a more important factor than price/performance when acquiring new firewall devices.
However, the implementation of firewalls going forward is not without challenges, as the study also found significant, persistent and widespread management issues, most notably related to firewall policy complexity.
“At the same time, firewall policy management remains a significant challenge,” Brazil said. “In a typical large enterprise, 35-40% of firewall rules are redundant, hidden or lack a business purpose—and two-thirds of policies are completely unnecessary. When you juxtapose these conditions with research such as the 2015 Verizon Enterprise Solutions PCI Report—which finds that firewall management remains one of the greatest threats to network security compliance—it’s clear this is a situation that commands a lot of attention.”
In its 2015 PCI Report in January, Verizon found that one of the most prevalent causes of PCI compliance breakdowns and related breach incidents is difficulty with network firewall policy management.
It found “that many companies fall out of compliance once it’s achieved,” driven largely by firewall issues, and that “fewer than one-third were still fully PCI-compliant less than a year after being validated.” Most notably, “of all the data breaches studied, Verizon’s findings clearly show that not a single company was fully PCI-compliant at the time of the breach,” further drawing a line between issues of firewall management and real-world breach incidents.