Five Critical Requirements for Internal Firewalling in the Data Center

No organization wants to see its name in the same headline as the words “massive data breach.” Yet, day after day, companies of all sizes, as well as nonprofits and government agencies, continue to make the news as cybercriminals and malicious insiders breach their defenses to exfiltrate sensitive data. Research firm Forrester Consulting reports that 58 percent of companies faced a significant security incident in 2019 despite spending more to secure their networks.1

Clearly, traditional defenses such as perimeter firewalls aren’t enough to thwart successful attacks. In fact, according to a Forrester survey commissioned by VMware, seven out of 10 enterprises are handicapped by an overreliance on perimeter firewalls.2

The perimeter has become highly permeable and, once breached, perimeter defenses can’t stop an attacker from moving laterally inside the corporate network to reach and exfiltrate records. At the same time, attacks involving insiders, who are already within the perimeter, account for a growing percentage of breaches.

Instead of relying on perimeter-based security, organizations must focus on monitoring, detecting, and blocking malicious internal traffic as a core component of their IT security strategy. This requires an internal firewall approach specifically designed to protect large volumes of internal data center traffic without sacrificing security coverage, network performance, or operational agility.

This white paper explains the difference between traditional perimeter firewalls and purpose-built, software-based internal firewalls, and why the latter is best suited to protecting today’s modern workloads.