You may be familiar with conventional network firewalls, host-based firewalls, network access control lists, AWS security groups, and Azure network security groups. However, next-gen firewalls differ significantly from these in order to address the unique challenges organizations face in identifying and securing traffic in today’s networks.
To develop a robust firewall security policy, you must understand how firewalls identify network protocols and applications, the cybersecurity risks that modern enterprise networks encounter, the core firewall security features, and how all of this correlates with business requirements.
This chapter’s objective is to establish a technical foundation that will enable you to better understand what next-gen firewalls can do in the network security domain and how they accomplish this. It will also lay the essential groundwork for studying the building blocks that PAN-OS provides for creating a security...