The Sourcefire next-generation firewall (NGFW) builds on the company's next-generation IPS (NGIPS) technology and FirePower platform, combining IPS threat prevention, integrated application control and firewall capabilities in a security appliance.
The firewall operates by combining granular control for more than 1000 applications with good visibility, intelligent automation and threat protection effectiveness. These capabilities are backed by the company's vulnerability research team and its collective security intelligence.
It leverages a single-pass engine that delivers deep inspection. The platform can be configured at the user’s discretion as an NGIPS and NGIPS with application control or an NGFW, providing the user flexibility to deploy appliances to match their infrastructure needs and scale over time.
Using FireSight technology, Sourcefire provides visibility into applications, users, content, hosts, attacks, vulnerabilities, behaviour and changes in a user’s environment. It correlates this information with user identity and reputation intelligence to assess risks and threat impact to make more accurate enforcement decisions.
The firewall employs intelligent security automation for more agile protection efforts that can keep pace with changing environments. It does this through contextual awareness and collective threat intelligence that can result in more meaningful policy recommendations and automated adjustments to a customer’s defence in real time. It allows security teams to optimise remediation efforts by reducing actionable alerts and filtering out events irrelevant to the user’s environment.