Cloud firewall vs Hardware firewall

I had already blogged about firewalls in an earlier post….to refresh one’s memory, a firewall is a hardware or software product that stands between the trusted zone such as an organization and the untrusted zone such as the Internet. It filters out malicious traffic from the Internet based on rules and allows only genuine traffic into the system. There are different types of firewalls. We will see the differences between Cloud firewall and hardware firewalls in this post.

Hardware firewall:

Hardware firewalls are physical devices which are similar to routers and they may sit between the network and the Internet. They examine the data packets and network traffic and inspect them and ensure that no malicious traffic enters the system.

One of the chief advantages with hardware firewalls is that since they are outside the system, the local network’ s speed is not affected. However, a hardware firewall may be bit more difficult to set up than software firewalls.

Cloud firewall:

With ‘cloud’ being such an ‘in’ technology these days, why not ‘cloud based firewall’, right?

A ‘Cloud firewall’ is exactly as is stated – a firewall that is hosted in the cloud. It performs all the duties of a regular firewall but it is in the cloud. Instead of installing a hardware firewall device or configuring a firewall software, we have to work with ‘Cloud firewall’ and configure it thwart attacks and malicious traffic.

Some of the advantages of cloud firewalls are scalability, availability, extensibility (Source: https://www.barracuda.com/glossary/cloud-firewall)

We have seen some of the differences between hardware firewalls and cloud firewalls in this post. Join me today as I uncover another Information security topic! 🙂

The previous post can be found here