There’s no denying the fact that firewalls are a necessary part of modern perimeter security. NAT isn’t a security construct. Attackers have the equivalent of megaton nuclear arsenals with access to so many DDoS networks. Security admins have to do everything they can to prevent these problems from happening. But one look at firewall market tells you something is terribly wrong.
Take a look at this recent magic polygon from everyone’s favorite analyst firm:

FW Magic Polygon. Thanks to @EtherealMind.
I won’t deny that Checkpoint is on top. That’s mostly due to the fact that they have the biggest install base in enterprises. But I disagree with the rest of this mystical tesseract. How is Palo Alto a leader in the firewall market? I thought their devices were mostly designed around mitigating internal threats? And how is everyone not named Cisco, Palo Alto, or Fortinet regulated to the Niche Players corral?
The issue comes down to purpose. Most firewalls today aren’t packet filters. They aren’t designed to keep the bad guys out of your networks. They are unified threat management systems. That’s a fancy way of saying they have a whole bunch of software built on top Continue reading
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One of my readers was reading the Preparing an IPv6 Addressing Plan document on RIPE web site, and found that the document proposes two approaches to IPv6 addressing: encode location in high-order bits and subnet type in low-order bits (the traditional approach) or encode subnet type in high-order bits and location in low-order bits (totally counter intuitive to most networking engineers). His obvious question was: “Is anyone using type-first addressing in production network?”
Terastream project seems to be using service-first format; if you’re doing something similar, please leave a comment!
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In the cloud and security realm, VMware's NSX has landed a notable customer.
It’s hard to believe in our ‘you are the product’ monetized world but there are some really good, high quality, free networking books out there, with absolutely no strings attached (think Ultron). Here’s a quick list of the one’s I know about. Please do let me know about any others you are aware of in […]
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