Click here to Watch Part II in this Series on The Modern Firewall

Trent: Hi there welcome back to TechScoop, thanks for joining us. Today I want to introduce you to a special guest, Tom Hickmott. Sitting here with me is one of our Solution Architects here at Techware.  Now when it comes to complex IT infrastructure design, I think you’re going to be pretty hard pressed to find a better bloke than this guy right here at completing that.

Thankyou for joining us Tom.

Tom: Thanks Trent, Glad to be here.

Trent: My first question for you Tom Is, what’s happened, what’s happened in the landscape has there been a catalyst change that’s driven us to have to look at the firewall?

Tom: Yeah, so I guess the biggest change over the last few years has been the move away from having all of your infrastructure having all of your applications at your office. We’re moving to an age where applications are going cloud and businesses are moving all of their infrastructure into the cloud. But also employees are coming into the office less, they’re working from home, they’re working from the road. So we’re starting to reassess all parts of the network and one of the big focuses is the modern firewall.

Trent: So from what I understand it’s mainly based around the fact of how everyone is working and there’s no real centralized location anymore. So it’s harder to protect one spot and it’s just not viable any longer.

Tom: Yeah correct, we’re looking at a scenario nowadays where were not just protecting the perimeter of your office and your branch offices. What we have to think about is protecting all of your users from anywhere in the world because most companies now, or a lot of companies now are moving to that modern workplace type scenario where it’s a work from anywhere approach. A user needs to be able to go home and do their work, they need to be able to work on the road while they’re travelling – all of that stuff. So that’s really changing how we look at Security and the role of the firewall.

Trent So I suppose in order to understand the modern firewall better, it’s probably best to start with the traditional firewall. Can you give us a run-down of what that looks like?

Tom: In a traditional sense you’ve got your employees, they sit at a desk in the office they access their data and applications that are located in the office. In order to protect them from internet based threats or protect them on the internet, you’ve got a firewall that sits on the edge of your network and it basically guards inbound and outbound threats and provides that gatekeeping function within your network. 

Trent: So when we’re looking at this type of firewall there’s gaps that are evident in it with the way that the workplace has changed and that’s what the modern firewall is trying to plug?

Tom: Yeah that’s right. Look we’re looking at protecting the users rather than the networks or the offices, at the end of the day if a user is going to be working outside of your network that’s where the threats are going to come into play. What’s going to happen a lot of the time is that a user is going to go home and if they’re unprotected whatever happens to them while they’re outside of the office will be bought back into the office. So we’re really about protecting the individual user rather than edge of the network.

Trent: Just to get a little bit more around the modern firewall, like you did with the traditional can you give us a little bit more of an idea of what it looks like?

Tom: The modern firewall now is a combination of products and services that are used to protect a user. So you add stuff in there like web filtering that will effectively protect your users whether they be inside or outside your network. You look at solutions like SDWAN and what that does is that it means that a user wherever they go gets their own private connection, it means that your applications and your data are not exposed to the internet. It reinforces that work from anywhere, wherever a user is.

Trent: I think we’re going to have to park it there for this week Tom, because that’s quite a lot of information but next week. I want to delve a little bit more into why the modern firewall is so important and a little bit more about how it actually works.

Until next time, I’ll see you soon..