Gabriel Lima, Sales Engineer at Hillstone Brazil, explains the factors that make Hybrid Mesh Firewalls a cornerstone of modern cybersecurity strategies for Brazilian organizations of all sizes.
With companies expanding beyond the physical office to encompass cloud services and support mobile workforces, the need for a more adaptable security solution has become apparent.
There is a growing demand for implementing and managing firewalls in hybrid environments. Today it is common to find organizations with firewalls deployed on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid cloud, or as an as-a-service model.
The Hybrid Mesh Firewall (HMF) is a model that meets the complexity of this new, ultra-distributed model. It characterizes itself as a multi-deployed firewall solution that includes hardware and virtual appliances, cloud-based models and as-a-service options. This intelligence is managed in a unified way, regardless of the user’s specific multicloud configuration.
According to Gartner, by 2026, more than 60% of organizations will have more than one type of firewall implementation, which will spur the adoption of Hybrid Mesh Firewalls.
It’s important to understand that a hybrid mesh refers to a network architecture that merges wired, wireless and virtual network components. In this context, ‘mesh’ refers to a network structure with interconnected nodes, while ‘hybrid’ indicates the combination of different technologies or environments.
What is a Hybrid Mesh Firewall?
The Hybrid Mesh Firewall platform is evolving to support a cybersecurity fabric architecture. Differentiators include:
Unified cross-platform security: Hybrid Mesh Firewalls provide strong protection measures, whether in the cloud, on-premises or navigating a mix of the two in a hybrid deployment.
Simplified oversight and management: Hybrid Mesh Firewalls offer simplified enforcement of security policies and operational tasks, ensuring that the network remains protected through optimized configurations. This is done without manual intervention, which optimizes the time of cybersecurity professionals.
Increased operational productivity: By merging diverse firewall technologies and security services, Hybrid Mesh Firewalls eliminate the need for multiple and disparate solutions. This consolidation results in significant cost reductions and operational efficiencies, while improving overall productivity.
Ever-changing environments
Hybrid Mesh Firewalls are designed to protect dynamic, ever-changing network environments. The use cases are:
Securing hybrid deployments: Hybrid Mesh Firewalls offer a range of deployment options – from physical appliances protecting on-site data centers to cloud firewalls protecting cloud-based resources.
North-South Traffic Management: Hybrid Mesh Firewalls bring perimeter inspection capabilities to the cloud. Hybrid Mesh Firewalls provide comprehensive traffic analysis to securely place the perimeters of modern network infrastructures.
East-West Traffic Control: Hybrid Mesh Firewalls play a key role in supporting micro-segmentation, which enables granular access control across ever-expanding networks (IT, OT, Internet of Things (IoT), Industrial Internet of Things (IioT) environments, etc). For more granular control, particularly at the application layer (Layer 7), Hybrid Mesh Firewalls take advantage of agent-based segmentation, ensuring that only certified and necessary communications occur over the network.
Security for remote work: Offering cloud-based firewall services, Hybrid Mesh Firewalls ensure that remote employees can securely access corporate resources without exposing the network to cyberthreats.
Security for cloud workloads: Hybrid Mesh Firewalls provide specialized protection for cloud assets, utilizing cloud-native solutions and micro-segmentation to protect against cloud-specific threats.
Misconceptions about this technology
Despite their adherence to the new challenges experienced by Brazilian CISOs, there are details of hybrid mesh firewalls that have to be understood for their excellent use within organizations.
A lot of people think of Hybrid Mesh Firewalls as a collection of disparate security solutions bundled together, which is not the case.
A true Hybrid Mesh Firewall security platform unifies multiple firewall capabilities under a single management console. Hybrid Mesh Firewalls use a shared operating system to provide continuous security across an organization’s network. In other words, hybrid mesh firewalls are not based on stitching together different products, but rather on integrating different forms of firewall technology into a single, simplified framework.
Another misconception is the belief that Hybrid Mesh Firewalls are too complex for practical use. Hybrid Mesh Firewalls are designed to simplify and automate network security, helping organizations maintain a robust security posture across all environments. The era of manual supervision is a thing of the past.
These factors make Hybrid Mesh Firewalls a cornerstone of the modern security strategies of Brazilian organizations of all sizes, operating in all regions of the country.
Click below to share this article