Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) is a new and revolutionary way of delivering firewall and other network security capabilities as a cloud service. Enterprises have always deployed next generation firewalls as appliances. While form factor varies between physical and virtual appliances, deployed on-premises or in the cloud, customers needed to support the full appliance life cycle. Distributed locations needed dedicated appliances that had to be sized and upgraded to accommodate business growth. Appliance software had to be patched and upgraded. Policy management had been done on an appliance basis. We refer to the “appliance straight jacket” and it had impacted both enterprises and service providers.

Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) is a new type of a next-generation firewall. It does not merely hide physical firewall appliances behind a “cloud duct tape”, but truly eliminates the appliance form factor, making firewall services available everywhere. In essence, the entire organization is connected to a single, logical global firewall with a unified application-aware security policy. Gartner has highlighted FWaaS as an emerging infrastructure protection technology with a high impact benefit rating.