Top 5 best NGFW vendors of 2023

The Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) vendors every network and security professional should know about

We have all marked 24 February 2022 in our minds as the day that the war between Russia and Ukraine started. This had a big impact on cyberspace in 2022 and will continue to do so in 2023. According to the NCSC UK, approximately one hour before Russia launched its major invasion of Ukraine there was an attack against Viasat. Although the primary target is believed to have been the Ukrainian military, other customers were affected, including personal and commercial internet users. Wind farms in central Europe and internet users were also affected. Therefore, in the upcoming year, we need to keep our eyes open for international attacks such as malware, ransomware, DDoS and network attacks. NGFW are an important element in the protection against these threats.

Next to this, we hoped that we got rid of COVID-19. Unfortunately, this is not 100% true yet, but we are not held hostage by it anymore. We have found a hybrid way of working with a balanced combination of office and home life. We do still see a demand for solutions that allow users to work from home, which included remote access solutions, video conferencing, and collaboration tools.

Most companies are now equipped with the resources to provide their workforce with remote access to the corporate network. The spike that we observed the last two years in demand for remote access solutions is over. However, we do still see a challenge in terms of security.

A firewall plays an important part in securing an organisation; but end-to-end security requires an NGFW vendor to also provide solutions for ATP, CASB, DLP and to support ZTNA. The top 5 vendors below have been selected taking these new requirements into account.

Next-gen firewall explained

There are many types of malware that a firewall can protect against these days, including ransomware, viruses, worms, trojans, adware, and more. Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) take it a step further, by offering the ability to not only identify but also completely block malware before it enters your network. NGFWs can swiftly detect and combat attacks across the entire network. As cyber-attacks continue to become more sophisticated, next-generation firewalls will continue to be essential components of any organisation’s security solution, whether you’re in a data centre, network, or cloud.

Reviewing next-generation firewalls and their capabilities is one of the steps that need to be taken to significantly improve an organisation’s security. Cyberattacks and advanced hacking methodologies these days not only drive enterprises to look for next-generation firewalls, but they also drive next-generation firewall vendors to optimise and update their solutions. The global next-gen firewall market is expected to grow at USD ~$4.69 Billion by 2023, at ~11.4% of CAGR between 2018 and 2023. It's the largest market in IT security products and still growing around 8 percent each year.

Malicious emails, phishing schemes, and other threats concealed in content can be hard to detect. Luckily, many next-generation firewall vendors offer the threat prevention capabilities IT security staff is looking for. The best firewalls include application awareness, centralised management features, Deep Packet Inspection, 100Gbps threat protection, as well as hybrid cloud security. For example, to help defend against the rise of malware, intrusion attempts bypass perimeter protection and other advanced threats.

Next-generation capabilities have been achieved by all solutions in the enterprise network firewall market, but vendors differentiate on feature strengths and depth. NGFW should be on every company's shortlist. - Mohamed El Haddouchi, CTO, Nomios

NGFW features to look for

Most suppliers of NGFW offer different types of firewalls; physical, virtual and containerised firewalls. Physical firewalls are available for all types of organisations, ranging from small and midsized enterprise campuses to large enterprise data centres and everything in between. Virtual firewalls provide protection in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud environments. Container firewalls offer security services to improve visibility and secure applications running in containers and microservices. Depending on your situation, there is always an NGFW that will fit your needs. Next, it is smart to look at the different features that firewalls offer.

Features offered by the best NGFWs include IDS/IPS, support for single-enterprise firewalls as well as branch offices, web proxy and URL filtering, Web Application Firewalling and virtual versions that can be deployed within the cloud.

For an NGFW comparison, it’s crucial to look for differences in the:

• Performance;
• Third-party security product integration capabilities;
• Ease of installation and use;
• Effectiveness at blocking threats;
• Additional features such as application visibility and cloud protection;
• And of course: pricing and consumption models.

Here are our picks for the top 5 vendors for NGFW in 2023

Palo Alto Networks PA-Series

Palo Alto was recognised by Forrester as the Leader for Enterprise Firewalls in the Forrester™ Wave in Q4 2022. And by Gartner® they have been named a Leader for ten consecutive years in its Magic Quadrant™ for Network Firewalls.

Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls consist of physical appliances (PA-series), virtualised firewalls (VM-series) and container firewalls (CN-series). They are all based on a consistent single-pass architecture and inspect all traffic, including all applications, threats, and content, and tie that traffic to the user, regardless of location or device type. They can secure multi-cloud businesses with their cloud identity engine and protect organisations from the SaaS explosion with an integrated CASB. Palo Alto has brought the power of inline machine learning to their cloud-delivered security services, where they established threat coverage in DNS security, web protection from unknown threats in advanced URL filtering and real-time protection with WildFire malware analysis.

In March 2022 Palo Alto announced that they have teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to unveil their new Cloud NGFW for AWS. It is a managed NGFW service for private clouds in AWS. The firewalls are equipped with Advanced URL Filtering, Threat Prevention and APP-ID. Advanced URL Filtering uses deep learning to intercept unknown threats (zero-day). Threat Prevention blocks advanced threats on every port. App-ID provides insight into application connections, behaviour and risks.