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5 Critical Mistakes When Evaluating a Next Generation Firewall
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Hello. My name is James.  

If your organization is in the market for a new firewall, you may already know that not all firewalls are created equal.   

Today, I am going to discuss five critical mistakes to avoid when evaluating a next-generation firewall and the importance of testing it with the organizations’ data and traffic.  

1 — Incorrectly Sizing the Firewall  

Many organizations today rely solely upon performance on paper summaries and data sheets. However, this should be avoided because they can create inaccurate comparison points. Instead, organizations should consider the size capabilities of their production environment. Trade-offs between performance and security should be avoided. It’s important to map to requirements for traffic composition and throughput.  

2 — Choosing a Firewall in a Silo  

The IT sector of an organization relies heavily upon firewalls to efficiently with performing daily functions. Therefore, when only the needs of the networking team are considered, this is a crucial mistake. The needs of all stakeholders should be considered.  

3 — Buying into Roadmap Features and Promises  

It’s very risky to purchase a firewall solely based on future roadmap features. Instead, an evaluation of your organization’s needs should be completed before a firewall purchase is made to ensure it is effectively tested and can be trusted.  

4 — Failing to Account for Ease-of-Integration and Scalability  

A next-generation firewall should further enhance your organizations existing IT infrastructure and be free of complicated integrations into the current ecosystem. Therefore, it’s important to avoid choosing a firewall without evaluating scalability.  

5 — Choosing a Firewall with a Steep Learning Curve and Minimal Support  

Choosing a firewall solution that maintains several management interfaces during hardware refresh phases should be avoided. It’s important to avoid selecting a firewall vendor that uses varying management user interfaces and design frameworks.  

By avoiding these five mistakes and running a proof of concept, your organization can benefit from greater security and heightened network performance.  

If you want to learn more about mistakes to avoid in a next-generation firewall evaluation, click the link below for more information.