2021 Q1 Enterprise Firewall Methodology 1.0

The firewall market is one of the largest and most mature security technology segments. A firewall is a mechanism used to protect a trusted network from an untrusted network while allowing authorized communications to pass from one side to the other, thus facilitating secure business use of the Internet.

Firewalls have undergone several stages of development, from early packet filtering and circuit relay firewalls to application layer (proxy-based) and dynamic packet filtering firewalls. Throughout their history the goal has been to enforce an access control policy between two networks, and they should therefore be viewed as an implementation of policy.

The Enterprise Firewall must be capable of performing deep packet inspection (DPI) on all packets, on all ports, and over all protocols to determine which applications are running over which ports and thus secure them effectively. In addition, with the expanded use of SSL/TLS in much of the traffic traversing the modern network, inspection of encrypted content is required.