What are the top-rated firewall solutions for securing your IT infrastructure?

Hardware firewalls serve as robust sentinels for your network, stationed between your internal network and the internet gateway. Ideal for large enterprises, these physical devices offer formidable protection against cyber threats. Equipped with dedicated resources, they efficiently manage heavy traffic volumes without compromising network speed. Their reliability and high-performance make hardware firewalls indispensable for safeguarding enterprise-level IT environments.

Consider solutions like Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) for detecting and preventing threats when securing your IT infrastructure. Network Access Control (NAC) can also be beneficial for controlling network access based on policies. Additionally, consider Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions to protect sensitive data. Endpoint Security solutions can protect network endpoints from potential threats. Lastly, Secure Web Gateways (SWG) can provide real-time web protection. Always choose solutions that best fit your organization's needs.

First of all, I will harden the physical device itself so that it will be tough to break into. Most of the Layer-1 devices come with built-in defence controls. Unless otherwise demanded—as in the case of a large number of devices to be managed—I would not consider bringing in a Hardware Firewall. If I have to, then I would rather consider spending a little more and buying a hardware device with an inbuilt firewall.

These are pretty sensitive and noisy, Layer-7 / WAF are the ones. Its not about whether to deploy one or not, is it actually required? If yes, then I'll start with Cloudflare, good to start with for a small business. But the configuration has to be right otherwise it ll be one annoying piece of control that you would just want to get rid of. Good for DDoS, enforce SSL and also gives you good insights to check and manage further. To an extend, it can also take over the DNS management load. - all in one console.

Top-rated firewalls for securing IT infrastructure include ->Fortinet, known for its leadership in next-generation firewalls (NGFW), and ->Cisco, which excels in network security solutions like NGFW, SASE, and SD-WAN Palo Alto Networks: Offers advanced NGFW capabilities with integrated threat prevention and SSL/TLS inspection. Check Point: Provides a comprehensive security suite including firewalls, VPNs, and threat prevention tools.

If the business demands, these NGFWs are so well capable of handling a lot more than just acting as a firewall. With a good configuration, This device can be a Firewall, IDPS, Threat Hunter, threat-fed correlation, log management, alerting and, to an extent Incident Respoding as well. Gives a good Web-management access to keep a check on the insights.

Firewall rules must be precise, in no way generic. Focus in provide meaning to all, clear name, a standard objects naming convention, a good change management process to add, update or delete, and in more sensible case a high level approval process, some rules are too important for the business, that requires an extra care in managing them.

Before creating the Firewall policies, one must consider the approach, apply strategy and design a control document that governs the Firewall and Its policies. For Ex: Define the scope, purpose and approach (Explicit-Deny), ports/protocols/services/traffic direction/action/alert etc to be predefined before creating the rules. Keep a backup of the configurations and version them. Review the policies every 6 months and get rid of all those that have fewer hits, and merge them with others so that the rules are kept under tight control - or else, before you know it, you'll be staring at 500 policies/rules put together, and no one would want to touch them.

Let's be honest, the best asset (in this case we're talking about a firewall) is the one that best suits your budget and meets your business needs. I don't think that a brand because it is famous in the market serves a company that is being born, in the same way that the opposite is true and always considering that investing in one layer does not mean that the others are protected, how about distributing the investment aiming for maturity in layers?

An additional comment that independently the technology of the firewall, the key area to manage well a firewall was and will always be keep a good control on the policies, reviewing, updating and removing. In my experience for many, many times we see firewalls with too many rules, just created and left there forever.