Next Generation of Smart Firewall - Twenty-Four Seven Security

« Podcast with IBM on Their End-to-End Security Solution | Main | Pricing Identity Management »

November 08, 2007
Next Generation of Smart Firewall

Found an interesting article at Dark Reading covering the next generation of firewall which essentially is a smart firewall. The company with the firewall, Mercy Medical Center, has to control access to 6,000 different users with a number of different uses and needs (from doctors to nurses to admin), but must also protect sensitive patient records.

Mercy Medical Center runs Palo Alto Network's PA-4000 Series firewall, and while standard, or I guess we can now call them old-school, firewalls, simply protect the network, and either allow or disallow users access to all of the network, the next-gen firewalls work at the application layer and grant access based on other variables, like data type.

Mark Rein, senior director of IT at Mercy Medical Center said, “We were surprised at some of the information that our partners had access to,” but emphasized that there were no HIPAA violations.

“We were running into some capacity issues with our existing firewall [Cisco’s IPX], and thought it was time to look and see what else was available,” explains Rein. The Palo Alto product beat out security products from a handful of vendors, including Cisco and Juniper, because it offered more granularity than other firewalls, according to Rein.

And once the system was up and running, the security problems stopped. “Before we were guessing about which applications users were working with. Now that we know, we want to make sure that employees have access to information needed to complete their jobs without raising any security concerns,” says Rein.