There are two types of cloud firewalls: Vanilla and Strawberry

Cloud-based firewalls come in two delicious flavors: vanilla and strawberry. Both flavors are software that checks incoming and outgoing packets to filter against access policies and block malicious traffic. Yet they are also quite different. Think of them as two essential network security tools: Both are designed to protect you, your network, and your real and virtual assets, but in different contexts.

Disclosure: I made up the terms “vanilla firewall” and “strawberry firewall” for this discussion. Hopefully they help us differentiate between the two models as we dig deeper.

Let’s start with a quick overview:

• Vanilla firewalls are usually stand-alone products or services designed to protect an enterprise network and its users — like an on-premises firewall appliance, except that it’s in the cloud. Service providers call this a software-as-a-service (SaaS) firewall, security as a service (SECaaS), or even firewall as a service (FaaS).
• Strawberry firewalls are cloud-based services that are designed to run in a virtual data center using your own servers in a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) model. In these cases, the firewall application runs on the virtual servers and protects traffic going to, from, and between applications in the cloud. The industry sometimes calls these next-generation firewalls, though the term is inconsistently applied and sometimes refers to any advanced firewall system running on-prem or in the cloud.

So why do we need these new firewalls? Why not stick a 1U firewall appliance into a rack, connect it up to the router, and call it good? Easy: Because the definition of the network perimeter has changed. Firewalls used to be like guards at the entrance to a secured facility. Only authorized people could enter that facility, and packages were searched as they entered and left the building. Moreover, your users worked inside the facility, and the data center and its servers were also inside. Thus, securing the perimeter was fairly easy. Everything inside was secure, everything outside was not secure, and the only way in and out was through the guard station.

Intrigued? Hungry? Both? Please read the rest of my story, called “Understanding cloud-based firewalls,” published on Enterprise.nxt.