Outlining the Critical Role of Firewall Technology in a Modern Connected Infrastructure

It is widely understood today that valuable corporate assets such as SharePoint sites cannot be exposed to direct access to the world’s users on the Internet. In the beginning, however, the Internet was built on the concept that all connected networks could be trusted. It was not originally designed to provide robust security between networks, so security concepts needed to be developed to secure access between entities on the Internet. Special devices known as firewalls were created to block access to internal network resources for specific companies.

Originally, many organizations were not directly connected to the Internet. Often, even when a connection was created, there was no type of firewall put into place because the perception was that only government or high-security organizations required protection.

With the explosion of viruses, hacking attempts, and worms that began to proliferate, organizations soon began to understand that some type of firewall solution was required to block access to specific “dangerous” TCP or UDP ports that were used by the Internet’s TCP/IP Protocol. This type of firewall technology would inspect each arriving packet and accept or reject it based on the TCP or UDP port specified in the packet of information received.

Some of these firewalls were ASIC-based firewalls, which employed the use of solid-state microchips, with built-in packet-filtering technology. These firewalls, many of which are still used and deployed today, provided organizations with a quick-and-dirty way to filter Internet traffic, but did not allow for a high degree of customization because of their static nature.

The development of software-based firewalls coincided with the need for simpler management interfaces and the ability to make software changes to firewalls quickly and easily. The most popular firewall brand in organizations today, CheckPoint, falls into this category, as do other popular firewalls such as SonicWall and Cisco PIX. The Forefront Edge line was built and developed as a software-based firewall, and provides the same degree of packet-filtering technology that has become a virtual necessity on the Internet today.

More recently, holes in the capabilities of simple packet-based filtering technology has made a more sophisticated approach to filtering traffic for malicious or spurious content a necessity. The Forefront Edge line responds to these needs with the capabilities to perform application-layer filtering on Internet traffic.