Unless you are new to IT or cybersecurity, you must have heard how the notion of a Secure Access Service Edge perimeter has evolved over time. It was once so easy: you had a corporate network, a giant firewall on the edge, and everything in between was assumed to be secure. These were the times when the office network was the world, and the firewall was the gatekeeper.

But jump ahead to the present, and that cute castle-and-moat model has disintegrated. Work is everywhere- in the cloud, at home, in personal devices, and in coffee shops. Information is no longer sitting in the middle of your data center but is now distributed across SaaS applications, IaaS providers, and edge devices. The old concept of a perimeter, of course, does not really hold.

And that is where Firewall-as-a-Service, or FWaaS, comes into the picture and changes the game.

So, What Exactly is FWaaS?

Let’s keep it simple. Firewall-as-a-service is, in essence, a cloud-based firewall. Rather than deploying and maintaining hardware firewalls at each office or data center, you build a firewall that resides in the cloud and secures all of your users, applications, and traffic, wherever they are.

Consider it as Netflix versus a DVD player. In old times, you needed to purchase the device, upgrade and maintain it, and handle all the technical pains. However, now it’s possible to stream what you want, at the time you want it. FWaaS functions in a similar manner- you use firewall services like a cloud service.

This means that you can take security policies with you wherever your users are, as opposed to having them restricted to a physical box in your server room.

Why Conventional Firewalls Are Failing in the Cloud Age

Old-generation firewalls were built for a time when everything inside the network was trusted. They sat on the edge and protected what was inside from what was outside. However, once your staff, applications, and information are ubiquitous, there is literally no edge to guard.

This is where the process begins to fall apart:

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