The ForcePoint Stonesoft Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) provides enterprises with an application-aware management and change automation platform for securing and maintaining compliance in their environments. Using modern technologies for analysis and automation.
Company Description
In January of 2016, ForcePoint was founded through the merger of Raytheon Cyber Products, Websense, and Intel Stonesoft. Its objective is to transform cybersecurity by focusing on what matters most: understanding people’s intent when interacting with sensitive data and intellectual property, regardless of where they reside. It is a privately owned business.
Product Description
Gartner classifies ForcePoint as one of two vendors as Visionaries. The ForcePoint Next-Generation Firewall links and secures people and data access across an organization’s offices, branches, and the cloud. ForcePoint NGFW enables security teams to rapidly deploy, monitor, and update thousands of firewalls, VPNs, and IPSs, regardless of whether they are maintained in-house or by a third party. It incorporates clustering for high availability and SD-WAN networking. It functions in concert with the ForcePoint Human Point System to safeguard users and data, as well as cloud and access gateways. The operation and performance of physical, virtual, and cloud-based appliances are united by a shared software core.
Features
- Security and performance The ForcePoint NGFW 2105 received the highest security effectiveness rating of all products evaluated by NSS Labs, 99.7 percent. The performance was a remarkable 7,654 Mbps
- Value NSS Labs assigned ForcePoint a TCO of $7 per protected Mbps, which is a touch slower than the market leaders but still a decent value.
- Implementation User surveys place ForcePoint near the top for ease of integration and deployment.
- Management ForcePoint’s centralized management and usability receive great evaluations, and customer satisfaction is extremely high.
- Support A relatively tiny channel network is a disadvantage, yet users are typically pleased.
- Cloud features ForcePoint’s firewall has been slower than its competitors to deploy cloud security features. The lack of CASB connectivity and Google Cloud support are limitations.
Other important characteristics are SD-WAN connectivity at the enterprise level:
- Built-in IPS with anti-evasion protections.
- High-availability clustering of devices and networks.
- Automated, zero-downtime upgrades.
- Policy-driven centralized management.
- Actionable, interactive 360-degree visibility.
- Sidewinder security proxies for mission-critical apps.
Alternatives of ForcePoint NGFW
Next-generation firewalls are a foundational cybersecurity product, on par with endpoint protection as a necessity for any organization. As the complexity of securing data and applications increases, so do the capabilities of security technologies designed to withstand emerging attacks.
The massive development of IoT devices, remote work, and emerging threats like ransomware has made perimeter protection more difficult and crucial than ever before, hence complicating firewall evaluation.
It is a next-generation, enterprise-grade firewall designed for efficient setup and operation. It provides firewall protection for the next generation and industry-leading operational efficiency. We had the opportunity to evaluate its capabilities, and this is what we think of the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall.
1. Barracuda Firewall Control Center
The Barracuda Firewall Control Center is a centralized administrative unit designed to handle tens of thousands of CloudGen Firewalls from a single interface. It has an extensive array of central management services and capabilities.
Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Features
- Hybrid infrastructure compatible with on-premises, virtual, and cloud-based firewalls
- Advanced threat prevention providing full system emulation for malware detection
- Stateful deep packet inspection to stop malformed packets and assaults
- High resiliency with automated load balancing and uplink choices
- Management of objects, repositories, updates, privileges, and configuration management
2. Check Point
Check Point Software Technologies, a seasoned firewall provider offers a comprehensive NGFW solution with its Quantum Security Gateways. The American-Israeli provider offers a variety of threat prevention solutions for businesses of all sizes, including IPS, anti-bot, application control, and URL filtering. Check Point’s current solution is extremely attractive due to its SandBlast Zero-Day Protection, which provides threat simulation and extraction against the most sophisticated threats.
Features of the Quantum Security Gateway
- Compatibility with hybrid infrastructure, including physical, virtual, cloud, and mobile segments
- SandBlast, a cloud-based emulation engine that stops hackers in their tracks
- Extensive physical appliance options with single and multi-domain administration
- Central management with policy configuration rollouts and rollbacks
- Maestro Orchestrator, a hyper-scale network security solution
3. Cisco
Cisco integrated their existing ASA firewall software with the Firepower NGIPS services software, and the result greatly surpasses Gartner’s definition of NGFW. The Cisco Firepower NGFW is the industry’s first fully integrated, threat-focused NGFW with unified management.
Cisco Secure Firewall Features
- Centralized management of firewall tools via the Secure Firewall Management Center
- Dynamic policy support with tag-based policies and attribute support
- Developer-friendly, highly elastic, cloud-native firewall options based on Kubernetes
- Log management with security incident and behavioral analysis The Cisco Talos Intelligence Group provides prompt and actionable threat intelligence.
Cisco Systems, the industry leader in networking, has continuously innovated to stay up with an ever-changing IT and cybersecurity landscape. In 2015, the vendor’s acquisition of the SD-WAN startup Embrane propelled it into the future with application-level traffic protection. In 2021, the Cisco Secure Firewall will provide real-time network and workload protection in dynamic situations. Cisco Secure Workload integration enables administrators to protect distributed and dynamic applications over increasing networks in the new era of computing.
4. Fortinet
If you’re seeking top-tier protection at a reasonable price, Fortinet should be on your list of potential vendors. FortiGate firewalls from Fortinet provide great protection at a reasonable price, making them one of the most popular firewall vendors and a frequent contender in enterprise shortlists. Along with Palo Alto and CheckPoint, Gartner rated the company one of three leaders in its Enterprise Network Firewall Magic Quadrant. In tests conducted by NSS Labs, Fortinet’s firewalls achieve top grades for security efficacy, performance, and value.
FortiGate NGFW Features
- Real-time threat-aware defense augmented by AI-driven FortiGuard Services
- Security Processing Units (SPUs) and virtual Security Processing Units (vSPUs) accelerate network security computing
- FortiOS, Fortinet’s security-focused operating system, with federated enhancements
- Capabilities for zero-trust identification of questionable individuals and devices and protection of segment
- Scalable IPsec VPN tunneling for remote and dispersed workforce security
5. Huawei
The full technological stack of telecommunications giant Huawei includes its next-generation firewalls, the Huawei USG (Unified Security Gateway) Series, suited for modern data centers and major enterprise enterprises. The company says that its most recent product, the USG6700E Series AI Firewall, cuts operational costs by more than 80 percent through simpler service deployment and changing policies.
Huawei USG6700E Series Features
- Employs policy-based routing (PBR) to control bandwidth per user and IP address
- Deception system for identifying threat actors scans and analyzing the occurrence
- Chip-level pattern matching and accelerated cryptography for improved performance
- Integrated tools consist of URL filtering, data loss prevention, VPN, antivirus, and intrusion prevention system
The Huawei Next-generation Firewall provides large and medium-sized enterprises, organizations, and data centers with simple, unified network security. TCO is decreased by fine-grained application-layer protection and service acceleration.
High-performance security is provided by an integrated firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, antivirus, and data leakage prevention system. Identifies over 6,000 apps, analyses intranet service traffic across six dimensions, and generates security policy recommendations automatically.
6. Juniper Networks
Juniper AppSecure, a component of NFGW Services, is a set of application visibility and control services for your network: AppTrack discovers network applications to evaluate their security risk and address user behavior. Contextual knowledge provides insight into which applications are permissible and the potential risk associated with them.
AppFW provides enforcement and control based on user-defined policies, restricting access to high-risk applications and implementing user-defined regulations. Reports on application bandwidth utilization provide additional insight, and unapproved application traffic can be throttled.
Juniper SRX Series Gateways Features
- Identify, protect, and manage application and user traffic using AppSecure
- Intrusion prevention system able to handle bespoke signatures
- Policy-based routing and SDN over wired, wireless, and WAN networks
- Micro-segmentation verified threat prevention and VPNs for enhancing security
Juniper Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and Sky Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP) collaborate to provide complete threat detection and protection against known and unknown network-based attacks. The features offer immediate protection against dangerous software. Continuous monitoring for new exploits and vulnerabilities maintains protection. Before damage can occur, the technology automatically prevents attacks on client and server systems.
7. Palo Alto Networks
Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) from Palo Alto Networks provide security teams with total network visibility and control through the use of potent traffic identification, malware prevention, and threat intelligence technologies. Instead of relying on port and protocol to protect network traffic from malicious threats, Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewalls provide organizations with a variety of advanced security tools and strategies that intelligently determine which applications, users, and content traversing the network are safe and which are not.
Palo Alto Networks NGFW Firewalls Features
- Options for SMBs up to enterprise-scale businesses, MSPs, and huge data centers
- Integrate existing user repositories to restrict application access using user-based rules
- Central management (Panorama) offers administrators a centralized location from which to handle NGFWs
- Threat detection and intrusion prevention based on machine learning
- Kubernetes protection with exfiltration prevention and DevOps-friendly configuration
Palo Alto Networks is largely regarded as one of the market’s top firewall solutions. The PA-Series has been designated as a Leader by Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls for the past three years and by Forrester’s Wave in 2020.
Over 900+ evaluations on Gartner Peer Insights, the firewall vendor has an average rating of 4.6/5 stars. The highest reviews and ratings for Palo Alto Networks highlighted product capabilities, integrations, and deployment. The most recent CyberRatings test results gave Palo Alto firewalls a AAA rating (the highest rating of ten).
7. Sophos
Sophos, a cybersecurity company based in the United Kingdom, offers a suite of firewall solutions under the Sophos Firewall Xstream architecture. With increasingly complicated network segments, the XGS Series of firewalls provides current data protection for SaaS, SD-WAN, and cloud traffic to enterprises. XGS Firewalls, which are informed by data scientists at SophosLabs, employ global threat data to automate detection and response, isolating suspicious behavior and preventing lateral movement.
Sophos XGS Series Firewalls Features
- Deep packet inspection, including intrusion prevention and proxy-based scanning
- Threat-aware traffic selection spanning all ports and supporting contemporary cipher suites
- Dynamic sandboxing and deep learning static file analysis capabilities
- Machine learning models to detect sophisticated and unknown attacks
- Monitoring providing visibility into web, application, and content traffic data
Sophos received the Visionary designation in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Its XG Firewall offers next-generation firewall protection that is simple to configure and administer. It prevents unknown attacks, responds immediately to security incidents by isolating compromised systems, and reveals hidden user, application, and threat risks on the network. Sophos also offers synchronized security (which connects endpoints and firewalls to enable them to communicate and share information, identify compromised systems, and isolate them until they are cleaned up), a web application firewall, email protection, and ransomware protection, phishing prevention, and a secure web gateway.
8. Barracuda Networks
Barracuda offers both traditional and CloudGen firewall solutions to both medium enterprise-sized companies. Both solutions give administrators granular control over their security and traffic flow through highly intuitive web-based interfaces.
Barracuda Firewalls Features
- DDoS protection and mitigation
- APT protection and detection
- Object-based NAT policies
- Content and rule-based filtering
- Bandwidth monitoring and QoS
If you’re not keen on a cloud-based solution Barracuda also offers on-premise appliances that can be fully managed by on-site staff. The physical firewall comes with all of the previously mentioned features, as well as traffic management options like packet forwarding, DNS/DHCP services, and a VPN gateway.
We like Barracuda firewall options for medium and enterprise businesses. Their pricing and onboarding are simple and allow administrators to deploy hardware quickly throughout their environment. Smaller networks with less technical staff might want to opt for a simpler solution or managed service.
