Not that long ago, bold predictions were being made by some of the most noteworthy pundits in the technology community that the majority of Internet infrastructure would be fully moving to the cloud. When enterprises moved en masse to the public cloud, they’d only need modern cloud security protections, the story went – and older network security methods such as firewalls would flame out and become obsolete.
But that day hasn't come.
Why is that so? And what does that tell us about the state of today’s enterprise networks – and what is truly needed to manage them safely and efficiently?
Inaccurate Forecasts of DoomIt helps to start by taking a look back at why traditional security methods, including firewalls, were considered to be a dying part of an enterprise’s security equation. It began with the advent of remote and mobile access.
As theories and approaches around providing remote access to information and data started to solidify, there was a growing belief – pushed by security companies and organizations set to profit from these alternative approaches – that on-premises firewalls would become redundant. In practice, what actually happened was that firewalls evolved to incorporate the functionality of remote access (VPN) technologies. Fast-forward a few years, and firewalls are still with us; VPN products are not – they’ve been folded into the firewalls as a feature.
This tendency repeated itself with the need for more advanced security filtering of traffic, which spawned the intrusion prevention system (IPS) market. IPS was thus perceived a threat to the firewall market until firewall vendors started offering built-in IPS capabilities. Similarly, other advanced security offerings such as secur ..
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