What is the hype around Firewall as a Service?

[LowcyGier]

Admit it. Who would not want their firewall maintenance grunt work to go away?

For more than 20 years, companies either managed their edge firewall appliances or had service providers rack-and-stack appliances in their data centers and did it for them.

This was called a managed firewall — an appliance wrapped with a managed service, often from a carrier or managed security service provider (MSSP).

The provider assumed the management of the firewall box, its software, and even its policy and management from the over-burdened IT team. But customers ended up paying for the inefficiency of dealing with appliances (i.e. “grunt work”) because the problem just shifted to the provider. A new architecture was needed - a transformation from an appliance form factor to a true cloud service.


In a 2016 Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection report, Gartner analyst Jeremy D'Hoinne initiated the emerging category of Firewall as a Service (FWaaS).

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