Evaluation of Virtual Firewall Vendors on Security and Management

AUSTIN, Texas – November 16, 2016 – NSS Labs, Inc., the world’s leading cyber security product research, testing, and advisory company, today released a new test methodology for virtual firewalls.

Firewalls have undergone several stages of development, from early packet filtering and circuit relay firewalls to application layer (proxy-based) and dynamic packet filtering firewalls. Throughout their history, the goal of the firewall has been to enforce an access control policy between a trusted network and an untrusted network.

The adoption of virtualization and cloud computing has driven the need for virtual firewalls, designed to operate in a virtualized environment and to protect virtual resources. As such, a virtual firewall is deployed either on or as an integrated part of the hypervisor, and has the ability to dynamically scale on demand. A major challenge to virtual firewall adoption is understanding security effectiveness and performance impact.

To address these challenges, NSS Labs has developed a new test methodology to evaluate virtual firewalls. The scope of the test will include:

• Security effectiveness
• Resistance to evasion
• Stability
• Performance
• Management
• Total cost of ownership (TCO)

“With production computing shifting to the cloud, demand for virtual firewalls is increasing dramatically,” said Mike Spanbauer, NSS Labs VP of Security, Test & Advisory. “As a result, our enterprise customers have been clamoring for NSS to test this technology so they can gain better insight and make fact-based purchasing decisions.”

Leading virtual firewall vendors are encouraged to submit their products at no cost. Vendors with major market share, as well as challengers with new technology, will be included.