Cloud Firewall vs Traditional Firewall Appliances

For years, business security meant a firewall appliance in the server room inspecting every packet entering and leaving the office. As applications moved to the cloud and employees started working from anywhere, firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) emerged as an alternative.

Traditional firewall appliances

A physical or virtual device installed at each site, inspecting traffic at the internet edge.

Strengths: full local control, inspection of internal traffic between segments and no dependence on external services.

Challenges: upfront hardware costs, capacity limits, firmware updates and separate management at each site. Remote users must connect back through VPNs.

Cloud firewalls

Security inspection runs in the provider's cloud. Traffic from offices and remote users is sent to the nearest cloud point of presence for inspection before reaching the internet.

Strengths: consistent policy for every site and user, no hardware to size or upgrade, easy scaling and simpler management.

Challenges: relies on connectivity to the cloud service, and some internal traffic inspection still needs local devices.

Cost comparison

Appliances have upfront costs and periodic refreshes; cloud firewalls are subscription-based. Compare total cost over several years, including management time.

Remote work

Cloud firewalls protect remote users without backhauling traffic to the office, improving performance.

Multi-site businesses

Cloud firewalls simplify policy across many branches, while appliances require consistent configuration at each site.

Hybrid approach

Many organisations keep a local firewall for segmentation and use cloud security for internet traffic and remote users.

The bottom line

Choose based on your sites, users and applications. UbiFi Cloud Firewall offers enterprise-grade protection without hardware headaches.

Learn more about Cloud Firewall from UbiFi, or talk to our team.