Why Cloud Firewalls are Important
As a baseline,cloud firewalls are a vital part of the cybersecurity toolkit: they sit at the organization’s cloud network perimeter, monitoring all traffic that flows into and out of it. This is called North/South traffic, and includes any network interactions with outside users or systems, like customers accessing cloud-based applications or internal end-users accessing cloud resources.
North-South network traffic makes up the vast majority of network traffic in most organizations: it’s at this boundary that firewalls monitor the content and legitimacy of every request. However, an increasing focus is now being placed on East-West network movement – that is, data packets that are transferred between devices within the organization’s cloud network. Attackers often leverage the implicit trust placed on internal resources, making East-West far more vulnerable to lateral movement of unauthorized network traffic and increased blast radius from any threats
Cloud firewalls can segment East-West traffic and catch account takeover and insider threats before they’re able to deploy malware or steal data. This is how.
Cloud Firewall Features
Monitoring the different types of traffic requires a number of core features.
Traffic Interception
At the core of the cloud firewall is its ability to strategically intercept traffic. This is often collected by positioning the firewall as a gateway, in a reverse proxy setup, and then running all requested data through it. To keep latency low, cloud firewalls will often be deployed geographically close to the organization’s headquarters and data centers.
Packet Inspection
Each network packet is analyzed according to the firewall’s underlying ruleset and analysis engine. The core details are header details like IP addresses, ports, and protocols. More stateful firewall analyses include the context surrounding each packet. Most advanced cloud firewalls now keep a running risk score around each connection; the enterprise can then identify the level of risk each resource can be subject to.
Enforcement of Security Policies
According to the packet inspection process, the cloud firewall then enforces a specific action that’s included in each rule. This can be as simple as blocking the connection, or as complex as requesting further authentication from the end-user.
Threat Detection and Security Tool Integration
Leveraging techniques such as intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS), a cloud firewall can integrate with other security tools to mitigate deeper threats like malware, unauthorized access, and suspicious activities. Firewall data is one of the most influential components to automated threat detection.
Logging and Reporting
The cloud firewall maintains a log of all policy-based responses, as well as the surrounding network activity. This is a crucial part of wider compliance and reporting capabilities.
On paper, these features don’t look that different from their traditional, physical counterparts – so what makes cloud firewalls so different?
Traditional Firewalls vs. Cloud Firewalls
Traditional firewalls are physical devices or appliances installed at an organization’s property under their control. They are usually physically stored in the same room as server stacks. From a network perspective, the firewall is located between the network router and all devices on the internal network. Every device is then configured to route their data flows via this firewall. This network architecture is still common today.
Rather than physically sitting in a server stack, cloud firewalls operate as a service accessible over the Internet. They rely on cloud virtualization to perform the same function as traditional firewalls—controlling data flow in and out of the private or public cloud network—but without the need for on-premises hardware. This architecture comes with several benefits, as we’ll discuss below.
The Benefits of Cloud Firewall Deployment
The firewall isn’t the only piece of technology that benefited from cloud virtualization. Virtualization is a technology that creates virtual versions of servers, storage, networks, and other physical hardware. It allows virtual machines to run simultaneously on a single physical machine by mimicking hardware functions through software. Cloud firewall providers rely on this outsourced architecture to power the firewall’s rule-checking and traffic analysis engines.
The benefits of this are multi-pronged.
Identify and Block All Malicious Traffic
The core benefit of any firewall is how it’s able to defend an enterprise from malicious traffic, like cross-site scripting and vulnerability exploitation. Cloud firewalls thwart attacks in two ways: by comparing packet data against a loaded list of pre-established attack patterns, and identifying patterns of network behavior that veers from the norm. The former relies on the cloud firewall provider’s threat intelligence feed, which is then continuously compared against your enterprise’s network traffic. Should anything align, the firewall is able to block a request before it reaches a protected network.
The latter is a newer approach to firewall protection. AI-powered firewalls are able to monitor traffic behavior in real-time, and a baseline of network behavior is established. Unusual patterns like excessive requests, irregular connection attempts, or atypical data transfers can all then be spotted and prevented.
While encryption conceals packet content, cloud firewalls can still analyze metadata in the packet headers, such as source and destination IPs, ports, and protocols. By examining patterns in the traffic, they identify anomalies or suspicious connections indicative of malicious activity.
Multi-Cloud Deployment
Many organizations rely on multiple cloud providers: whether it’s developers relying on GitHub as a code repository, sales relying on their own CRM tool, or HR communicating over Outlook. All of these are different forms of cloud-based tools. Cloud firewalls enable multi-cloud networking, securing hybrid and public cloud networks.
Because cloud firewalls are virtualized, they’re uniquely able to scale to the specific traffic demands of a network. They’re also able to group devices into small subnetworks – a process called micro-segmentation. This reduces the blast radius in the event of network compromise, as an attacker can no longer rely on inherited trust between applications or users.
Prevents Hardware Chokepoints
Traditional WAFs have often suffered from added latency that then gets passed onto the end-user. This is especially true for hardware firewalls that are nearing capacity. Cloud firewalls avoid this by being deployed as close as possible to each edge device, supported by cloud firewall providers’ local Points of Presence (PoPs). As traffic does not have to be funneled through a single hardware device or appliance, network choke points are avoided
Scalability
Cloud firewalls are able to rapidly scale up in response to dynamic cloud traffic needs without the complexities of on-site installation, maintenance, or upgrades. Some cloud firewalls can scale with load balancers and virtual infrastructure, automatically adapting to increasing bandwidth demands, ensuring consistent performance. This is how they can effectively leverage the elasticity of cloud infrastructure automatically providing the correct number of firewalls as workloads or traffic changes.
Availability
Cloud firewall providers ensure high availability thanks to the distributed infrastructure they rely on. This includes redundant power, HVAC, and network services, as well as automated backup strategies to handle site failures. This level of availability is challenging to replicate with on-premises firewalls due to the significant costs required – not to mention the redundant physical resources that would require. Additionally, cloud firewalls enable seamless updates, applying necessary changes instantly without the need for extensive system downloads or manual interventions.
How to Use Cloud Firewalls to Enforce Zero Trust Security
Cloud firewalls play a pivotal role in implementing zero trust security models by enforcing strict access controls and continuously verifying all network traffic, regardless of its origin. Cloud firewalls are able to assess the individual context of every request – even East/West, between different internal cloud networks or subnets.
The principle of zero trust relies on ‘never trust, always verify’, and cloud firewalls are an essential component to zero trust architectures – but they’re far from the single security approach a zero-trust project should be relying on. Security management doesn’t stop at the network, but it’s one of the most vital building blocks to achieving zero trust.
Cloud Firewall Best Practices
Just like physical firewalls, cloud firewalls require a degree of support and updating throughout their life cycles. Firewall best practices can quickly become a paralyzing rabbit’s nest of do’s and don’ts, so here’s a quick list of the top zero-trust best practices.
Don’t Just Rely on Preconfigured Rules
Most firewalls today come shipped with preconfigured rulesets that cover the most common network-based attacks. However, these aren’t specific to your organization – and the specific contours of your network require their own firewall policies. For instance, if an enterprise has no use for the LinuxConf configuration program, all access to port 98 should be disallowed via a firewall. On the other hand, consider only allowing access to ports for the specific programs that your enterprises’ teams actually need.
Maintain a Solid Base of Policy Documentation
Whenever your cloud firewall rules are changed, the documentation surrounding each rule should be edited accordingly. Every security team member should be aware of where this documentation is, and the change process surrounding each document.
Audit your Firewall’s Performance
Detecting firewall weaknesses demands regular review of its configurations: this is best performed by pentesting, or penetration testing, which analyzes the firewall’s resilience under attack conditions. This is one of the clearest ways to assess how well-configured a firewall truly is – as long as the pentesters provide a full report of your firewall’s responses.
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security
Check Point CloudGuard Network Security is a cloud-based next-generation firewall that goes beyond simple packet analysis, to deliver advanced threat prevention, hyper-scale networking, and streamlined management in a single solution. SandBlast technology offers cutting-edge defense against both known and unknown threats by employing an evasion-resistant sandbox to analyze suspicious files in a secure environment, identifying and blocking zero-day attacks before they infiltrate the network. Complementing this, CloudGuard Network Security threat extraction is able to remove malicious content from documents in real-time, delivering sanitized files instantly to users without delaying workflows, ensuring both security and efficiency.
All of this is controlled via a single unified management system, further simplifying operations with centralized visibility and control. This ensures consistent policy enforcement across on-premises, private and public cloud, and remote environments alike. Explore the dashboard and the firewall’s capabilities with a demo.
Choosing the correct firewall can seem like a daunting prospect: it’s why we put together a Next Generation Firewall buyers guide, which goes in-depth on the specific features and real-world outcomes of the modern firewall.
Feedback