Ultimately, the type of firewall(s) you choose is dependent on your unique use case. This firewall also incorporates threat intelligence to provide more robust filtering and scanning. This firewall opens the envelope and reads the contents, allowing for a much deeper inspection of potential policy violations and malicious content. Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW): While traditional firewalls would check the to and from addresses on an envelope and even how it was sent, NGFWs goes a bit farther.Circuit-level Gateway: Rather than inspecting individual packets, circuit-level gateways assess network protocol sessions including TCP handshakes across the network between devices inside and outside the firewall to determine whether the session is legitimate.Each packet is analyzed and compared against known or familiar packets. Stateful Multilayer Inspection (SMLI) Firewall: As the name implies, this firewall has parameters set for examining packets, or chunks of data at individual layers of filtering.It serves as the middleman to protect network resources, filtering messages at the application level where users interact directly (think Google Chrome and Safari). Proxy Firewall: Also known as the application or gateway firewall, a proxy firewall monitors information going in and out of the network.Packets that check out across established filters are sent to the requesting system and all others are discarded. Packet Filtering: Small chunks of data called packets (analogous to an envelope in the mail) are analyzed and compared to a set of criteria.There are many types of firewalls, including secure email gateways which are sometimes referred to as “email firewalls.”īelow, we highlight and define five key hardware firewall technologies worth knowing:

Firewall security