Lari Luoma has over 20 years of experience working in the fields of security and networking. For the last 11 years, he has worked with Check Point Professional Services as a security consultant helping customers worldwide to implement the best in class cyber security. He is a subject matter expert in hyper-scalable security solutions.
In this outstanding interview, Lari Luoma shares insights into how to give new life to older firewalls. Discover new mindsets, methodologies and helpful moves for your organization.
Please provide context:
Many organizations use physical firewall clusters with hardware that’s a few years-old, which might not be powerful enough to provide enough protection and performance in today’s traffic conditions and threat landscape. These kind of clusters are ineffective and often not powerful enough to provide sufficient protection in high traffic and low latency conditions.
Why is this a problem?
Traditional active/backup-clustering technology does not fully utilize the capacity of the system, since only one member is active and the backup member takes over only if the primary one fails. This means that half of your security investment can sit unused for years. You also should test these kind of clusters regularly to ensure their failover capabilities.
Why should CTOs, CIOs or CISOs prioritize this issue?
With high-availability clusters you don’t get everything out of your security investment. In high traffic and low latency conditions it is crucial that you can utilize the full potential of your hardware platforms. With Check Point Quantum Maestro you can use your existing hardware to the fullest and get better security without having to worry about performance.
How can organizations upgrade?
Check Point Quantum Maestro is a revolutionary new security architecture that enables businesses of any size to enjoy the power of flexible cloud-level security platforms, and seamlessly expand their existing security gateways to hyper-scale capacity. Maestro is effectively a stack of up to 50+ security appliances that are orchestrated into several logical gateways called security groups on a single system for maximum efficiency.
There are two ways to migrate your existing gateways into Maestro.
- Migrate the existing cluster members keeping all configurations
- Add gateways to an existing Maestro Security Group to boost its performance.
You can mix and match different hardware models.
What else should defenders know about giving new life to old firewalls?
Quantum Maestro introduces a new, simplified way to manage cyber security, saving time and money. Grouping hardware into logical gateways gives the operational supremacy where only one member gateway represents the entire security group. Other gateways clone configuration from the first one.
Closing sentiments
Outdated firewall software can facilitate exposure to threats that result in remote code execution, denial of service attacks, and other misfortunes. If you decide that giving new life to old firewalls isn’t the right route for your organization, consider replacing your firewalls altogether. A replacement firewall may be able to offer extra features and can potentially support more connections. With more connections, organizations can integrate more wireless access points into a single hardware, and can extend a wireless network further without additional hardware purchases.
For more exclusive firewall security insights, see CyberTalk.org’s past coverage. Lastly, to receive cutting-edge cyber security news, insights, best practices and analyses in your inbox each week, sign up for the CyberTalk.org newsletter.
