Cloud-Based Firewalls: The Future of Enterprise Security

Many organisations face issues with traditional network security access solutions like a Virtual Private Network (VPN) and a firewall. This is because of their inefficacy in meeting modern cloud infrastructural needs.

Both firewalls and VPNs don’t effectively meet the needs of large-scale access and security requirements and often come with cybersecurity risks, complexity, and performance issues. They also increase operational costs and hamper the user experience.

This is why businesses are increasingly shifting towards secure and much more scalable cloud-based network firewall solutions.

In this article, we’ll learn more about the benefits of a cloud firewall or secure cloud access for your organisation over native firewalls and VPNs. Let’s begin!

Cloud Native Firewall and Its Benefits For Your Organisation

Ensuring on-premise network security through seamless and secure cloud access is highly important to combat cloud security threats and vulnerabilities.

Before getting into the benefits of cloud security, let’s see what the problems are with VPNs and firewalls for network access.

As enterprises increasingly depend on using multiple security tools to protect multi-cloud environments, it results in a vulnerability-ridden and complex network infrastructure.
Traditional VPNs and firewalls offer poor and inadequate security, increasing the attack surface.
Traditional VPNs don’t support modern digital transformations, like Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) and cloud access for remote working employees.
These traditional cloud services don’t provide network visibility and control, making it difficult to monitor the network infrastructure and user activity across the network.

Now, let’s see the best-managed cloud firewall benefits you get for your organisation.

Secure access by remote employees

Unlike VPNs that allow the entire traffic to access and view the entire network and its resources, secure cloud access implements access on the least privilege access on a need-to-know basis.

Thus, users can now only view and access the resources they require for their work instead of accessing all the resources and applications. It ensures secure and single-click network access by remote employees while ensuring maximum network security and protection.

Enhanced user experience

The cloud-based firewall for small businesses offers private and fast connections that provide single-click access to remote employees.

Employees can easily access multiple cloud applications and software hosted in multiple cloud-based environments. Moreover, unlike VPNs, cloud-based secure access doesn’t come with backhauling and latency issues and instead boosts performance and faster speed.

This seamless and enhanced user experience also enhances the user’s productivity.

Seamless network management

A cloud firewall service simplifies and facilitates network management.

It makes it easy to manage access for all your cloud applications, software, and assets from a single centralised and intuitive dashboard. Using this dashboard, you can minimise the management complexity of several monitoring and management tools.

You can also monitor the user’s activity, the user’s access to the network’s applications and resources, and the device a user uses to access the network.

Reduced operational costs

When it comes to scalability and expanding your network environment for remote access, VPNs increase the management complexity because of the redundant security stacks. Moreover, it also increases the operational expenditure of adding more devices and users and expanding the network environment.

On the other hand, software-based cloud unified access services for software and applications hosted on hybrid cloud environments significantly minimises operational costs or redundant tools and services.

Conclusion

Firewalls don’t efficiently protect your network against advanced security breaches and online threats. While they work for small-scale network security, you need a much more reliable and secure cloud access solution for your remote cloud access.

A zero Trust Cloud Security access significantly reduces security breaches, reduces the attack surface, provides complete network visibility and control over employees’ access privileges and network activity, and ensures a seamless and smooth performance.

So, if you want to replace your firewalls and traditional VPN solutions with a robust cloud solution, check out our InstaSafe Zero Trust Security solutions, like Secure Cloud Application.