Top 5 Enterprise Firewalls CTOs Trust

Can you guess what might be the prime concern of today’s CTOs?

Reportedly, over the past 10 years, there have been 300 network and data breaches involving the theft of 100,000 or more records.

And that’s our answer!

Managing network and information security, if failed, has the potential to put one in a dicey situation.

Ending up as a fiasco.

Enterprise Firewall is often in the front line when it comes to obstructing the unwanted network traffic.

It regulates network traffic between untrusted sources such as the Internet and trusted sources such as the WCMC network.

To be more precise, the Enterprise Firewall blocks all network traffic that has not been explicitly allowed leading to a 360 degree protection.

Here we are with a list of the best enterprise firewalls that CTOs trust:

• Palo Alto Networks
• Fortinet
• Check Point
• Cisco
• Forcepoint

Palo Alto Networks provides the best enterprise firewalls for a variety of enterprise environments, including Kubernetes (K8) containers as well as branch offices and data centres.

Palo Alto’s hardware product is the well-known PA-Series, which can be installed in all of your enterprise’s offices and data centres.

The virtual firewalls in the VM-Series protect public and private cloud environments, as well as software-defined networks.

Containers are protected by the CN-Series for Kubernetes. It inspects and filters traffic and enforces namespace segmentation policies for Kubernetes container environments.

Instead of sitting at the edge of the Kubernetes environment, Palo Alto’s NGFW sits within it, allowing it to determine which specific pod traffic is coming from.

The resulting traffic data will be more accurate, allowing teams to determine which channel of a container environment requires more attention.

If you want to deploy a firewall specifically for your Kubernetes clusters, we bet, Palo Alto will be your thing.

• Management console with a robust insights
• Best enterprise firewall customised for Kubernetes container environments
• Public cloud protection for all computing platforms.

Fortigate, Fortinet’s award-winning firewall product, provides a wide range of NGFWs in both hardware and virtual machine configurations.

Chassis, data centre, and entry-level firewalls are among the hardware offerings that administrators can control and configure through a single pane of glass console.

The management console also includes a predefined compliance checklist that recommends best security practises and assists administrators in tracking their compliance status with relevant regulations like PCI-DSS.

Fortinet’s own operating system, FortiOS, supports unified policy configuration in its most recent release.

This enables network administrators to manage all policies, including zero trust network access (ZTNA), from a single interface.

It also supports HTTP/3.0, ensuring that web traffic using newer standards is secure.

Fortigate users can access FortiGuard Security Services, which include features such as IP geo-tracking and IoT device detection.

The cloud sandboxing feature addresses threats such as ransomware by allowing users to analyse malware and receive real-time intelligence about potential threats.

The capabilities of FortiGuard enable enterprises to monitor specific device and network policies, including operational technology (OT) policies.

FortiGuard’s intrusion prevention system searches libraries containing thousands of threat signatures and employs AI and machine learning to block those threats based on existing IPS rules.

• Broad spectrum of deployment options and firewall sizes
• Threat analysis by cloud sandbox
• Centralized operating system and FortiOS

Check Point Software Technologies’ Quantum series of best enterprise firewalls is available for a wide range of business use cases.

Quantum contains large enterprise firewalls as well as a hyper scale network security solution.

When businesses need to rapidly increase throughput capabilities, the hyper scale solution enables them to quickly scale existing network gateways.

Quantum Rugged provides industrial appliances for harsher enterprise environments such as manufacturing and energy.

They are specifically designed to withstand harsh weather conditions and protect industrial technology from attack.

Check Point also provides firewalls for small businesses. Quantum Spark appliances are manageable via web and mobile applications.

Smaller businesses can also get endpoint protection for Mac, iOS, PC, Android, and Linux devices through the SMB Security Suite, which includes the best firewall hardware.

If you’re an SMB or smaller enterprise looking to get your feet wet with best enterprise firewalls, Check Point is a good place to start.

R81, Check Point’s unified security management platform, supports all NGFW administration.

Check Point automatically updates policies set by network administrators, reducing some of the manual burden on network and security teams.

Gateway performance optimization is another automation capability: the management platform automatically allocates core and hardware resources based on how much traffic is present at the time.

This helps improve network performance.

• The best firewall for small business
• Management platform with automation features
• Sandblast protection for testing malware

Cisco Secure Firewall, one of the best enterprise firewalls, focuses on security and consistent policy management.

Cisco intends for the solution to extend the security of the firewall to the network infrastructure via capabilities.

For example, advanced policy enforcement for distributed applications on the network.

Administrators must be able to enforce security policies for all applications, not just a subset of them.

Cisco offers a variety of best enterprise firewalls, including the Firepower and Meraki MX series.

Cisco Secure Firewall is available as a virtual private cloud solution that protects VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and KVM environments.

It’s also available as a public cloud solution for AWS and Azure to protect data and applications.

Cisco’s firewall log management employs behavioural analytics to respond to threats more quickly.

The log management solution can use data from all of an enterprise’s Cisco Secure Firewalls, including those that are geographically dispersed.

Analyzing traffic from all firewalls can assist a company in detecting potentially malicious patterns occurring across the network.

Cisco TLS Server Identity and Discovery enables enterprises to maintain Layer 7 OSI security policies on encrypted TLS 1.3 traffic.

This means that the traffic will remain encrypted, with the content hidden from threat actors, rather than being decrypted in chunks, which would require a lot of processing power.

• Firewall log management with behavioural analytics
• Unbroken Layer 7 OSI policies on encrypted TLS 1.3 traffic
• Protected virtual firewall for multiple virtual environments

Forcepoint provides the best firewall hardware for a variety of applications, including retail stores, remote and branch offices, campus networks, and network edge deployments.

It includes a number of hardware appliances, such as the Modular Network Interface, which allows for extensible network interfaces on rack-mounted best enterprise firewalls.

The extensible interfaces allow for network adapter connections.

Forcepoint’s best firewall enterprise are also available as cloud images and virtual appliances.

AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and IBM are all supported by the cloud firewall. VMware ESXi, VMware NSX, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, and Nutanix AHV are all supported by the virtual firewall.

Virtual private network (VPN) capabilities, intrusion prevention systems, and mission-critical application proxies are all built into each firewall. Proxies provide security functionality to protect critical apps.

Forcepoint’s Secure SD-WAN solution includes NGFW protection to improve traffic filtering and stop attacks such as ransomware.

If your company is looking for an SD-WAN solution, take a look at Forcepoint’s Secure SD-WAN and accompanying NGFW.

The NGFW from Forcepoint includes security features for IP packet fragmentation and TCP segmentation.

When packets pass through network links, IP fragmentation divides them into smaller pieces. This allows attackers to send portions of packets to locations other than their original address without being detected.

• Cloud image firewall for five major cloud providers
• Virtual firewall for five virtual environments
• IP fragmentation and TCP segmentation protection
• The best firewall hardware for SD-WAN customers

Before choosing the right firewall enterprise for your firm, you must consider the experience of your IT support team.

Some solutions are more difficult to configure than others. If your IT or security team is inexperienced in working with next-gen firewalls, determine how much technical support the vendor will give you in deploying and then potentially implementing it.

Reaching out for the help desk services outsourcing is always a wise choice, but of course, its completely yours to choose.

Next important stuff is that you also will have to look out for the other security offerings te same vendor can provide you.

Especially if you are expanding or retooling your company’s infrastructure.

Integrating different solutions that work well together can decrease infrastructure management tasks that might otherwise arise from using multiple security programs.

Throughput—the amount of traffic that can pass through a firewall at one time—sometimes varies from the vendor’s top estimate.

So before purchasing your estimated best enterprise firewall, open your eyes with a big O.

Throughput needs depend on the traffic your company network typically receives, and throughput capabilities determine whether customer-facing technology like websites keep up with traffic requests.

Demand a free trial, it always works best!

Phew! Done with all those quality check?!

Now you’re good to go.