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Firewalls are the most fundamental and critical layer of network protection. They monitor traffic, filter, and block based on security policies to protect your organization from cyber threats. Firewalls can be either hardware or software, and they can also be hosted on a device or an entire network. Today’s firewalls come in many flavors that support different use cases, ranging from basic traffic filtering to advanced capabilities like enabling secure SD-WAN or threat intelligence.

A foundational firewall principle is to allow only the minimum amount of data that serves a critical business function. This requires that the firewall rules are defined with extreme precision and that they are reviewed regularly to ensure that they still align with business requirements and threat landscapes.

While basic packet filtering looks at each data packet in isolation, stateful inspection takes a macro view of the network’s communications by maintaining a database of active connections and evaluating each communication session to assess whether its behavior is expected or malicious. This offers more advanced protection but can impose a greater load on network resources.

More sophisticated firewalls also evaluate encrypted data packets to detect patterns of known malware, enhancing detection with anti-virus and NGFW tools that look for signatures. Lastly, some firewalls act as proxy services and forward data from inside to outside systems, reducing workload for IT teams while bolstering network security. In addition, some firewalls can automatically reallocate additional resources to critical applications during unexpected peak traffic conditions and then reassign them back when conditions return to normal.