According to this Data Center Journal report, firewall vendors currently fall short in terms of firewall management functions and the upcoming trends in firewall management. This article outlines firewall features that are real game changers when it comes to firewall management.
“The first commercial firewall, SEAL, was introduced in the early 90’s and was managed through the vi text editor. The Visas firewall, by Bob Braden, was the first firewall with a GUI. Check Point’s Firewall-1 3.0 administration tool demonstrates several important concepts, including a rule base with an object-level abstraction and support of one policy across many firewalls.
“That was 1996. It’s amazing to see how similar this product is to contemporary firewall administration tools; apparently, very little progress has been made.
“By contrast, core firewall capabilities have been significantly extended. Starting off as simple packet filters, they quickly merged with routers to perform NAT and went on to do IPSec VPNs, content and URL filtering, SSL VPNs, antivirus, and antispam. Recently, firewalls have merged with IPS and have started providing true application-level filtering and user access.”
