Basic FWaaS will cover your firewall needs and block suspicious network traffic, but incorporating more advanced features that it offers will bolster your security.
Let’s take a look at the most common advanced FWaaS features, and which ones are right for you.
Here are some major security challenges that your business faces.
The first priority for any organization is to ensure compliance with security and data privacy regulations.
Failing to comply can result in poor security that lends itself to a data breach, and then you will be subject to fines, customer loss, and potential litigation costs.
Customers whose data is stolen may become victims of identity theft, and you would, in that case, likely be required to compensate them if your compliance failures led to the initial data theft.
Basic FWaaS can help ensure that your business operations are compliant with your region’s legal requirements. However, implementing advanced FWaaS features for enterprises can improve on an already strong security tool, and you can rest assured that your business is taking every possible precaution to avoid allowing your customers’ (or your own) data to be compromised.
To avoid the financial losses that come with a successful attack, your business needs cyber threat protection and threat intelligence on top of the FWaaS solution.
While FWaaS helps by identifying, filtering, and blocking traffic based on unusual activity, it is a single preventative measure that keeps the traffic away from sensitive data and your network.
Additional interventions are necessary to protect against potential attack vectors, such as weaknesses in your cloud application’s code and internal threats.
An advantage of FWaaS is its ability to scale according to the growth of your business.
Although a traditional firewall is effective for small numbers of machines connecting to a local network within one office space, FWaaS can cover a much larger scope. It is a cloud service, which means you can protect your network whether connections are on-premises or accessing the network remotely. It is also better able to adapt to new threats than a traditional firewall due to AI and machine learning.
Here are the 5 advanced FWaaS features to keep your data secure and your network protected:
IDS detects potential threats and alerts security teams to the attempted attack.
The next-generation firewall prevents attacks by blocking any unusual activity that breaks the rules it has been provided, and it is able to handle most common threats.
However, for more sophisticated attacks, it’s useful to have IDS around as this tool is better equipped to detect subtle threats that are not always recognized by a virtual firewall. Rather than relying on broken rules, the IDS flags a threat based on activity patterns that match those of known threats.
DLP identifies and blocks unauthorized access to an organization’s network.
While the firewall acts as a barrier around the entire network, data loss prevention focuses more on protecting endpoints, so attackers are unable to access the devices connected to the network. DLP does many of the same things at those endpoints that a firewall does for the network, including:
This extra layer of security benefits compliance efforts, and it helps prevent unauthorized data exfiltration.
SWGs analyze your requests and determine whether it is safe for you to access any given website or application, and if it is not, the secure web gateway prevents you from accessing that. This prevents malware and other attacks from using you to deposit them inside your firewall and DLP.
If you can’t access the malware, you can’t expose the rest of your network to it.
A CASB also enforces security rules and security policies, but it sits between a cloud provider and you (as opposed to between the endpoints and you, for example). CASBs focus on multiple forms of identity verification, including:
Because cloud service providers do not take responsibility for securing your data, and because your firewall doesn’t cover the cloud service provider, there are often security gaps. These gaps are exploitable when you access your cloud resources.
CASBs help fill those gaps to reduce the risk of a security breach to both parties.
This integration is vital for access control, and you can use it to add or remove access as needed.
When you’re addressing potential internal threats, IAM is invaluable. One of the greatest risks to your security is an internal threat, so it’s important to take advantage of an effective user management tool that can prevent unauthorized access and put limits on users.
Adopting Perimeter 81’s FWaaS offering means adopting a fully integrated security solution that will keep you in compliance and protect your environment from threats while maintaining scalability and flexibility.
Using advanced security tools gives you a leg up, which is essential in a world of more complex and subtle threats. In the end, firewalls work best when you’re using all of their security features.
To learn more, you’re welcome to request a demo.
