Firewall
The evolution of the internet and the development of the firewall go hand in hand. Years of research from multiple vendors have sculpted the firewall into its current shape. Today’s next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) have a much more complicated job than their predecessors. 30 years ago firewalls simply allowed or restricted outside access to particular network resources by monitoring ports and IP addresses.
To meet a rapidly changing threat landscape, firewalls have matured from plain packet filters to elementary stateful packet inspectors transforming into the Next Generation Firewall of today. Now firewalls are enforcing network security policies, logging Internet activity and securing an organization from outside threats. As more applications are being built on a web based platform, firewalls can decrypt and inspect web traffic to identify which applications are hiding in a TLS session and stop threats and data breaches.
