What is FWAAS

Firewall as a service is a term used for the cloud firewall. A cloud firewall is a firewall like NGFW with all the security features offered by the firewall plus some additional vital benefits, mainly deployed in the cloud.

Nowadays, most organizations move from traditional network architecture to Cloud infrastructure because of the benefits they get from Cloud architecture. Cloud firewalls keep the traffic secure from and to cloud infrastructure. It also offers more benefits compared to the traditional NGFW. It provides most of the security features that the NGFW delivers and additionally, it offers better Deep Packet Inspection. Above all, this is deployed in the cloud and can be adjusted based on the size, configuration, and security needs of the network/organization. It can quickly expand without human intervention based on the growing bandwidth trend and users´ demand.

Why organizations do needs FWAAS

Nowadays, mostly everyone is moving to the cloud infrastructure because of the benefits they get in the cloud. Organizations can quickly expand the scalability of the firewall based on their usage, no need to spend a lot of time and money procuring the physical appliances and configuring them; get someone trained on the product. The cloud vendor takes care of all the infrastructure of the appliance and the organization will pay only for what they use based on the subscription. You don´t need to worry about spending a lot of money deploying hot/cold/warm sites for the Disaster recovery process.

When an organization has multiple locations or branches, deploying one firewall at each unit would be very costly. Cloud firewalls can protect traffic from anywhere. This makes the better option for the organization with multiple branches.

Gartner estimates that FWaaS will go from $251 million to about $2.6 billion by 2025, considering the current remote worker trend. With FWaas, an organization network that spread across the regions could use a single unified firewall that protects each one of the branches in a different area.

Benefits of FWAAS vs. Traditional Firewall

• Reduced Overall Cost
• Better Scalability
• Better Flexibility
• Improved Inspection and Security
• Simplified Deployment and Maintenance
• Unified Security Policy