hello and welcome to firewall management
201 I'm Professor wool and today we're
going to be looking at some of the
challenges we face when dealing with
what I like to call the disappearing
Network perimeter what do I mean by that
well here's a picture of the way we used
to think about firewalls we have our
outside public Internet then we have our
firewall
and then we have our internal network
where those desktops and our servers and
our databases and it's very clear where
the network perimeter is it separates
the outside world from our internal
networks unfortunately there are at
least four trends that make this simple
picture no longer accurate the first
trend that we've been seeing for quite a
while is on the road and they're
connecting to the network to use the
internal resources look like this we
have to control and filter traffic to
that segment of the network even though
it's not strictly inside our network
yeah the second trend that we see is
outsourcing
we have some of the traditional favors
that used to be in our network now they
are outside on the outsources Network
connected to some network and connected
then into our corporate environment now
for the firewall perspective we have to
control traffic into the outsources
environment and out of it which means
that now the perimeter also complicated
recent trend is virtualization that has
multiple virtual machines inside of it
and we can run servers inside this
virtual environment and these virtual
machines are connected to a network that
is also virtualized it's inside the
virtualizing box and all of this is
connected to our traditional physical
infrastructure we now have to control
and filter traffic as it goes into this
virtualized environment from our
traditional physical network and back
but the challenge is that this traffic a
large piece of it is inside the virtual
environment inside the box it does not
leave the box and if I will obviously
cannot filter traffic that it does not
see so we have we have a
we have a challenge and they want to use
it as part of their business and on
their mobile and also when they're the
same should apply when they're on the
first floor and when they're on the
fifth floor even though the traffic is
coming from different directions we
still want the same policy to apply this
is a challenge in terms of a filtering
policy luckily we have some
technological developments that help us
regain control of the disappearing
Network perimeter and technologies that
we might want to consider what is
next-generation firewalls
next-generation firewalls do two things
for us first of all they let us filter
traffic not only based on ports and
protocols but also based on the
application that is being used so we can
determine what that device is really
trying to do and filter based on that
and the second thing is next generation
firewalls allow us to make filtering
decisions based on the identity of the
person making the connection another
technology that is useful in a different
area is hypervisor level firewalls that
let us control traffic in virtualized
environments both inside a virtualized
and going into and out of that
virtualized environment and as we move
on we will see some mechanisms and
policies that made us regain this
control and develop processes that let
us control and filter this traffic in a
reasonable and effective way so stay
tuned for the next segments of the
series and thank you very much
