As more applications move to the cloud and hybrid cloud environments, so too do the threats and bad actors that permeate today's businesses. Today, defending against such threats is only half the battle, and preventing against the vulnerabilities — specifically, complex chains of simple vulnerabilities — that we cannot see will separate thriving businesses from their counterparts. Organizations will be forced to either evolve their mentality — or lose out to evolving threats.
Let's begin with how cloud computing placed new pressures on the firewall. The firewall, like many businesses of the late 21st century, has had to evolve as cloud environments became the norm.
Originally introduced in the late '80s, the first network firewalls were developed to protect private networks by securing gateway servers to external networks like the Internet. Generally speaking, firewalls were designed to block or allow "north/south" traffic according to rules that had been set up to define what was permissible and what's not, thereby defining the "perimeter" for the enterprise. To this day, firewalls still continue to excel at solving this specific problem where it exists.
But cloud computing introduced a new wave of complex cloud and hybrid environments that changed what the "perimeter" looks like, causing the firewall to evolve. We have seen the introduction of virtual firewalls, intended for the public cloud, that provide some visibility around where connections come from or where they are going. However, that is only a minor evolution, and still relies upon a traditional way of thinking about the world at its core.
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