Gartner predicts over the next four years, 20% of new distributed branch office firewall deployments will switch to FWaaS. There are other market shifts afoot too - firewall deployments are moving to the cloud and the rapid surge in endpoints will accelerate the growth of firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) to secure cloud environments Opens a new window. Today, cybersecurity vendors of all sizes deliver physical, cloud-based and virtual NGFWs for small and mid-sized businesses and large enterprises. Of note - Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions are also referred to as NGFW. The next-gen firewalls packed deeper capabilities - such as user-based access control, IPS filtering, applications awareness and control, data leakage protection (DLP), secure web gateway and can integrate with other software that maps IP addresses to actual users on the network, defines Palo Alto Networks. The cybersecurity major debuted application awareness in firewalls that kick-started the new era for NGFWs.98

And this was all that was needed to close the network security loop until pure-play cybersecurity vendor Palo Alto Networks gave the standard firewalls a refresh by creating a market for next-generation firewalls (NGFW).

The traditional firewalls packed these core capabilities - packet filtering, VPN and stateful inspection/stateless inspection of incoming and outgoing traffic. Your network firewall is what guards network access points to servers, web applications, and endpoints.

Firewalls appeared around three decades ago as a much-needed solution to manage the network sprawl and monitor incoming and outgoing network traffic.

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