Next Generation Firewalls are the Need of the Hour Date:   Wednesday , January 30, 2013 Headquartered in San Jose, CA, Dell Sonicwall is a provider of Internet security solutions and appliances for business continuity, network and content security business units. The company was acquired by Dell for $717 million in October 2012 to extend its security software and services portfolio. Transitioning from hardware products to software services Dell originally was recognized as a PC company, then as a server technology provider, and recently the company has made inroads into the storage department. The Force10 acquisition covered the gap with respect to the networking space. In the complete sense of the story of Dell, security was one chapter that was prominently missing. Hence the priorities are to transform into a complete M2M company. Hence Sonicwall fits in very well from a security point of view. So seeing from a change perspective this was always anticipated worldwide. Three years back the next generation enterprise class firewalls was released. Due to success in the SME product lines, people always reckoned Sonicwall as an SME company. One clear cut priority is to get the rightful share in the SME market. Dell has given Sonicwall the access to a large customer base and will help the firm with its plans for overall vertical growth. The drivers Security is a space that involves constant changes and the main drivers are innovation, new applications and processes. New and more modified ways of attacks are constantly evolving. BYOD also brings in more security concerns. With the next generation firewalls there are a whole lot of entities that are gaining traction. For instance, a company CEO realizes that 25 percent of the office network is actually being used for non businesses such as Twitter, Facebook and Torrent to name a few. The older versions of the firewall cannot distinguish traffic coming between the websites and the unwanted applications. Similarly it is a challenge to decipher if it is Facebook traffic or website traffic which is required for the organization. But the next generation firewalls not only allow distinguishing between the wanted and the unwanted network traffic scenarios but allows building policies around the same, which in turn will help the organization to monitor them for increasing productivity. The Corruption within the Enterprise Today CIOs are noticing the fact that the 30 percent of corruption arises within the company’s network. The biggest trend of 2013 is going to be that of BYOD penetration. Though this is not such a big security concern, it is something which companies want to invest in with respect to security. For instance, no matter how secure the BYOD assets of an employee are made, there is always a chance of the device getting compromised in the hands of his kids or some other cause. This might affect the whole system. By keeping networks secure it can lead to a situation where attacks cannot enter, and attacks cannot leave the respective network. The different scenario is that at the next generation of firewalls can filter traffic in and out of a complete security system. Clearly the new trend will show maximum penetration of BYOD which, in turn lead to security process transformations. Today the penetration of next generation firewalls is very low in the industry. As per the predictions of the research firms, the old firewalls have been using old technologies. So a change or a refresh is something that can be seen very evidently in 2013. (As told to Vignesh A)