Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW)

The rate of change in IT environments is unprecedented. At the same time, attacks are coming at a rapid pace and with an increasing level of sophistication. In an attempt to provide effective protection, NGFWs have added application control to the access control capabilities provided by traditional firewalls. This isn’t enough.

With the Sourcefire Next-Generation Firewall, Sourcefire extends the power of Agile Security™ and its leadership in Next-Generation IPS (NGIPS) to NGFWs. For the first time, customers can support access and application control policies today without sacrificing protection tomorrow.

The Sourcefire NGFW is the only solution of its kind to add best-in-class threat prevention and robust access and application control to advanced firewall capabilities.

Sourcefire Next-Generation Firewalls
Sourcefire 3D8140 6 Gbps	Sourcefire 3D8250 10 Gbps

Key Sourcefire NGFW Capabilities

Stateful firewall inspection	NGIPS threat prevention
Switching, routing & NAT	Automated impact assessment & policy tuning
Application control	Network behavior analysis
Real-time network and user intelligence	Sensitive data filtering
IT policy compliance whitelists	URL filtering (optional)

What a Next-Generation Firewall Should Be

Designed for organizations that want ultimate flexibility to deploy appliances to match their infrastructure needs and scale over time, the Sourcefire NGFW delivers unique advantages to combat threats in today’s real world:

• Total Network Visibility: Sourcefire realized long ago that you can’t protect what you can’t see. Our FireSIGHT® technology gives you passive, real-time visibility of hosts, applications, operating systems, users, content, attacks, and more.
• Control Without Compromise: With NGIPS built-in, you get third-party validated, best-in-class threat prevention as part of your NGFW. When combined with granular application and URL access control down to the individual user, you’ve got the total network protection you need today and tomorrow.
• Intelligent Security Automation: Because there aren’t enough hours in the day or people on staff to keep pace with changing environments and threats, Sourcefire NGFW allows you to automate more administrative functions than any other NGFW solution.
• Unparalleled Performance and Scalability: You need more protection but you also need to maintain network performance. Our appliances, based on single-pass architecture and FirePOWER™ technology, deliver stateful firewall inspected throughput options ranging from 40Gbps down to 1Gbps with minimal degradation as security functions are added.

What Matters for Today’s NGFW

A new Ponemon Institute study of NGFW implementations in organizations across 15 different industries in 5 countries found that among security professionals:

• Threat prevention ranked as the most important feature for data protection
• Firewall ranked as least important feature for data protection
• Most organizations deploy NGFW to “augment” (not replace) existing firewall infrastructure

The Sourcefire NGFW is ideally suited to close the gaps in today’s NGFW deployments.

“Next-generation network IPS will be incorporated within a next-generation firewall, but most next-generation firewall products currently include first-generation IPS capabilities.”
-- “Defining Next-Generation Network Intrusion Prevention,” Gartner, 7 October 2011