What is a firewall? How they work and how they fit into enterprise security

Firewalls been around for three decades, but they’ve evolved drastically to include features that used to be sold as separate appliances and to pull in externally gathered data to make smarter decisions about what network traffic to allow and what traffic to block.

Now just one indespensible element in an ecosystem of network defenses, the latest versions are known as enterprise firewalls or next-generation firewalls (NGFW) to indicate who should use them and that they are continually adding functionality.

What is a firewall?

A firewall is a network device that monitors packets going in and out of networks and blocks or allows them according to rules that have been set up to define what traffic is permissible and what traffic isn’t.

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