Research Overview

Network firewalls are one of the oldest solution categories in the cybersecurity market. Much like firewalls that isolate parts of a building to prevent the spread of fire, network firewalls emerged to separate organizations' private networks from the public internet. Early firewalls enabled organizations to inspect incoming and outgoing traffic. Over time, firewalls evolved to include additional functionalities that allow organizations to examine traffic more deeply and provided organizations with more active security controls.

While network firewalls have been evolving in the past years, they did not emerge to secure environments that fully or partially rely on the cloud. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the transformation of the organizational perimeter. Since nearly all employees became remote and started using external applications, organizations faced a new challenge of securing decentralized and distributed environments. Because of that, a growing number of organizations will choose the newer generation of firewall solutions that are better suited for today’s infrastructure. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) will take the central stage in the network security market, with the firewall as a service (FWaaS) component gradually replacing legacy firewalls.

Organizations will turn to a new set of networking and security practices with zero trust principles at their core. Vendors will attempt to reinforce the importance of traditional network firewalls within the new security architecture, but their role will be declining. At the same time, although organizations are migrating workloads to the cloud, their data centers will not cease to exist. While some organizations may be slow in adopting the cloud, others may choose to keep their data centers for compliance reasons or privacy concerns. The continued reliance on traditional data centers against the backdrop of the cloud migration trend indicates that the use-cases for network firewalls will continue to be in demand in the foreseeable future.