|
It's a fact that firewalls are moving to appliances and the reason behind it is to make them as secure as possible. It's not the appliance itself, which makes a difference, but the OS (firmware), memory, processing power, architecture and the kernel, which drives it.
The major problem seen with the software-based firewalls is the performance basically with network traffic control, since it relies totally on the underlying hardware for its stability and performance. Moreover, any missed security patches on the underlying OS can have the firewall system compromised even while the Firewall is running. A firewall is not isolated in a design, but rather integrated with corporate VPNs and IDS as well.
When it comes to a firewall, downtime is a big NO. It requires a high processing and memory power to perform all these transactions. In fact Nokia last year announced that all of its enterprise range firewalls will be appliance based. Why have firewall software from one and install it on another vendor's hardware, when you can have a single vendor providing all the services in just one box. Appliance takes away the headache of maintaining security patches for each – the hardware, OS and the firewall software.
|
