Firewalls will always be required as they are the sole devices that analyse and control communication of data and applications.

Firewall technology ensures networks are running the way we want them to.  As a result I came to the conclusion that the question is not ‘will on-premise firewalls disappear’, but ‘how will firewalls be influenced by cloud technologies?’.

In order to address this we have to look at some of the history.

Enter Unified Threat Management

10 years ago the first perimeter architectures consisted of a fast packet processor (the firewall) and a battery of content scanning servers.  Each server was dedicated to a specific task (a duty) such as locating spyware or virus scanning.  Each was from a different vendor and each was managed separately – it was genuinely best of breed and from a pure performance perspective it was ideal. 

However this design is a complicated multi-component perimeter infrastructure …