Increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks have led organizations to adopt correspondingly sophisticated levels of security control. Information security professionals now expect cyberattacks to be part of their normal operating environment and realize that these attackers wield effective tools that greatly exceed the capabilities of yesteryear’s script kiddies. Such advanced weapons require equally sophisticated defensive measures.

Many enterprises currently rely upon a security infrastructure full of niche solutions that were designed to combat earlier threats. The major challenge these niche solutions pose is that they do not communicate with each other, so they can’t share critical information to help establish and enforce security policies.

Next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) address this problem by providing a single point of visibility into multiple areas of security functionality. They provide security teams with the ability to control network traffic in a manner that protects enterprises against cunning attacks.

NGFWs achieve this by integrating multiple security technologies in a single platform. They combine the features of stateful inspection firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, content filtering and application control on a single piece of hardware and then allow those components to communicate with each other.

Read the full CDW white paper: Next Generation Firewalls: The New Norm in Defense