Introduction

Every enterprise requires at least one firewall to provide the backbone for its network security architecture. Firewalls are the core component of your network's security. The risks today have greatly increased, so the call for a stronger breed of firewall has been made. In the past, simple packet filtering firewalls allowing access to your internal resources have helped to mitigate your network's risk. The next development was stateful inspection allowing you to monitor network sessions instead of single packets. Today's risks are far greater and require a new generation of devices to help secure our networks' borders from the more sophisticated attacks.

Firewalls police your network traffic. A firewall is a specialized device that allows or denies traffic based upon administratively defined policies. They contain technologies to inspect your network's traffic. This technology is not something that is exclusive to firewalls, but firewalls are designed specifically for inspecting traffic and therefore do it better then any other type of device. Any network can have millions of packets transverse it in a short period of time. It is impossible for a human to directly interact with the network. Even if you were to use a tool to look at the traffic directly it would be impossible for you to decide which traffic is good and which is bad. The need for a specialized device to enforce traffic restrictions has grown over the years. Because security is of such high importance, a specialized device was required to ensure the security of...