DR on Future firewalls - agrees on app awareness but misses identity awareness
Related to my earlier post Future firewalls are protocol, application and identity aware, Dark Reading today has an article spinning on the same topic entitled Firewalls Ready for Evolutionary Shift. I consider Identity and Application awareness to be the two most important features in future firewalls simply because they enable firewalls to function more like they were, and are, intended. An IP no longer identifies a user and a port number or even a protocol no longer identifies an application, and firewalls need to make their decisions on other parameters that does.
The article agrees with me on Application awareness, and as I, also reference Palo Alto Networks App-ID. In addition to that, Gartner also feels that integrated IPS-functionallity will be “next-generation”, which I don’t agree with. Integrated IPS-functionallity gives no new security functionallity. It is perhaps more practical, but it doesn’t solve any problems that IPS-systems have. That the article don’t mention identity awareness is sad in an otherwise great piece.
And, sometimes I wonder what Gartner is smoking. These paragraphs got my attention
CheckPoint, Cisco, and Juniper, for instance, already have some initial basic IPS capabilities in their firewalls today, Young says. “It’s less about firewalls and more about how networks and users have changed,” he says. “As they change, the firewall is forced to change.”
Gartner, Juniper is offering their full blown IPS as a blade in their ISG-series (Integrated Security Gateway).