Sourcefire launches next generation firewall

Sourcefire has entered the following generation firewall sector with the launch of its latest appliance and platforms.

According to the corporate, the Sourcefire Next Generation Firewall combines powerful IPS threat prevention, integrated application control and firewall capabilities in a high-performance security appliance.

Speaking to SC Magazine, Sourcefire's director of product management Jason Lamar, said that companies are actually facing a dynamic environment and an answer hinges on next generation security. He also said that users want more contextual awareness of our surroundings that they're attempting to protect.

He said: “We see it as a critical innovation: it's not just technology but the way you use it. Today users make a compromise and are forced right into a decision with only a firewall and a more evasion problems. In the event that they know what they've, then with contextual awareness they are able to suggest solutions for policy and prevention.”

Lamar said that the Sourcefire next generation firewall is built out of innovation in its next generation intrustion prevention system (IPS), and that it doesn't buy into the idea of the ‘next generation firewall'.

“You need app control, for this reason we invented it in 2003, as a degree is required. However is just too simplistic to mention ‘kill all the attack vectors with policy ‘, as solutions should enable something that might rather be blocked,” he said.

“App control is a logistical extension to policies and otherwise to enforce policies, nonetheless it seriously is not enterprise security. We believe customers desire a better quality alternative and do not want an IPS with a firewall with one other user interface. They need layered benefits and a platform but don't need to renounce prevention and function within the firewall.”

According to Lamar, the Sourcefire next generation firewall is built on four concepts: app control; access control; threat prevention; and contextual awareness. Lamar said often solutions can have the 1st three of these, but its addition of contextual awareness is made possible with its FireSIGHT technology that offers a map of the network.

FireSIGHT, in keeping with the corporate, is an extension of its real-time user awareness from 2003 and provides increased visibility into applications, users, content, hosts, attacks, vulnerabilities, behaviour and changes in a user's environment. It then correlates this data with user identity and reputation intelligence to evaluate risks and threat impact to make more precise enforcement decisions.

The company's existing FirePOWER platform delivers deep inspection and may be configured on the customer's discretion as an next generation IPS, a next generation IPS with application control or as a next generation firewall, providing the shopper ultimate flexibility to deploy appliances to check their infrastructure needs and scale over the years.

Lamar said: “This is a growth opportunity for us and we see it as an expectation of the market. Security is a huge data problem and our focus is that users have security incident and event management (SIEM) for a reason; to grasp what multi-product data is coming in but there isn't any closed loop. FireSIGHT gets the data and makes the call so that is good for compliance and governance.”