Che cos'è firewall as a Service (FWaaS)?
Firewall as a Service, or FWaaS, is a cloud firewall service that delivers on-demand traffic analysis and threat blocking. FWaaS aims to combat some of the key security limitations faced by organizations relying on older, on-premises firewall setups. Delivered through globally distributed cloud points of presence, FWaaS protects users, devices, and applications wherever they are, ensuring consistent, scalable, and low-latency security across on-prem, cloud, and remote environments.
Why Traditional Firewalls Aren’t Enough
For decades, enterprise security was designed around a clear perimeter. Corporate networks were composed of individual devices connected to the office’s LAN; traffic left the network at predefined points; and at this defined perimeter, a traditional firewall could be deployed.
In these older firewalls, administrators implemented rules that allow or block traffic based on predefined factors like IP addresses and port numbers. These rules are often manually managed and periodically updated. However, this model was dated – it architectured a well-defined boundary between trusted internal systems and the untrusted external internet. Large swathes of today’s corporate networks no longer match this outlook.
This is due to a number of underlying factors:
- The Cloud Has Dissolved the Perimeter: Applications and their corresponding data were once confined to corporate data centers – however, they’re now often handled by SaaS platforms, IaaS providers, and hybrid environments. Users directly access Salesforce, Microsoft 365, or AWS-hosted apps from corporate devices – bypassing the corporate firewall entirely. Traditional perimeter-based firewalls cannot enforce policies consistently across this fragmented infrastructure.
- Remote and Hybrid Workforces: Employees now regularly work from home, co-working spaces, airports, and everywhere in between. A perimeter firewall sitting in a headquarters cannot effectively protect users and devices scattered worldwide. Backhauling traffic through corporate networks for inspection also risks introducing latency, slowing employee work, and frustrating end-users. For example, a WFH engineering team may access their GitHub accounts from home networks, syncing code repositories directly. A perimeter firewall in the office does nothing to protect against account takeover or data leakage.
- Evolving Threat Landscape: Attackers no longer rely on brute-force external penetration alone; they exploit supply chains, compromise credentials, and rely on lateral movement across trusted networks. Once inside, a traditional firewall’s effectiveness is limited because it primarily guards the edge – not internal east-west traffic.
- Multi-Cloud Infrastructure: An enterprise runs workloads on AWS, Azure, and GCP simultaneously. The “perimeter” is no longer a single chokepoint but a distributed mesh of virtual networks across providers. Traditional firewalls, tied to fixed appliances, cannot scale to enforce uniform policy across these dynamic environments.
Come funziona firewall as a Service (FWaaS)
Il Firewall as a Service prende la funzionalità di un Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) e la sposta da un apparecchio fisico al cloud. Questo disaccoppiamento delle funzionalità di sicurezza dall'infrastruttura fisica consente a un'organizzazione di connettere in modo sicuro una forza lavoro e uffici mobili remoti alla moderna rete aziendale, dove le applicazioni risiedono on-premises e nel cloud.
FWaaS emerged as a response to this breakdown. Delivered via cloud-native architectures, FWaaS extends enterprise-grade firewalling to wherever users, devices, and applications reside – without requiring traffic to be funneled back through core physical appliances at HQ. FWaaS offers policies that can be defined centrally and enforced globally, with deep inspection of traffic across distributed environments. The question of FWaaS vs traditional firewall is defined by FWaaS’ sheer elasticity and location agnosticism.
The Key Capabilities of FWaaS
FWaaS represents the evolution of network security into the cloud era. Rather than relying on hardware appliances installed in data centers, FWaaS delivers enterprise-grade firewalling through a cloud-native platform. It centralizes visibility, enforces consistent policies, and scales dynamically to protect users, applications, and data – no matter where they reside.
Below are the core capabilities that define FWaaS and differentiate it from traditional firewall deployments:
Centralized Dashboard
A key USP of FWaaS providers is their highly customizable interface. Because the firewall hardware is virtualized, FWaaS providers are able to build user-friendly dashboards that take all real-time traffic information and convert it into accessible information
It’s from this dashboard that security professionals can then define firewall policies across groups of users, devices, and locations. Administrators can apply consistent access controls, content filtering, and threat prevention rules globally, without manually configuring multiple on-prem appliances. This centralization simplifies compliance, reduces human error, and allows instant policy propagation across distributed environments.
A FWaaS dashboard acts as a security team’s comprehensive logging and analytics tool. At the same time, it gives deep operational insight with in-depth reporting tools such as automated compliance requirements like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.
Cloud-Native Scalability and Elasticity
FWaaS functions like any other cloud-delivered infrastructure services: providers deploy large-scale firewall systems within large-scale, central data centers – the shared resources grant a customer firewall capabilities at a lower cost than buying their own hardware. Each customer’s environment is kept isolated and secure – similar to every other Software as a Service (SaaS) model. As a result, each customer can implement the configurations and policies that their own traffic requires, while still relying on third-party hardware. Because FWaaS is built on this elastic architecture, the underlying firewall capacity automatically adjusts to meet an organization’s changing traffic volumes and growth.
This dynamic scalability also removes the need for detailed capacity forecasting, reducing the operational burden on CISOs and allowing them to focus on strategic security initiatives.
Since FWaaS providers operate such large-scale data centers, they often need to consider efficiency in how a customer’s traffic is routed and returned to a customer’s own network. Points of Presence, or PoPs, are a FWaaS provider’s response to this: routing a customer’s traffic via a geographically nearby data center reduces the latency between its source and origin. PoPs are centrally-managed but geographically distributed data centers, allowing the provider to keep traffic closer to the customer’s or cloud resource’s location.
PoPs can also help a global FWaaS organization to organize and protect the traffic from different branches. Instead of backhauling everything through a server in one country, it’s possible to deliver high-quality firewall capabilities and speeds wherever a FWaaS provider has PoPs.
Protezione avanzata dalle minacce
Since FWaaS providers sit at the forefront of modern network security, they’re able to offer a far wider-ranging suite of advanced security controls than most home-grown firewalls. Most FWaaS providers are able to offer Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), which continuously inspects the actual payload of packets as they pass through. Some providers can also offer this to encrypted traffic, with SSL/TLS decryption granting full visibility to the firewall admin.
Alongside DPI, FWaaS providers offer automated threat detection in the form of signature and behavioural analysis. Real-time traffic data is referenced against a constantly updated database of threat signatures and behavioral patterns, which is derived from global threat intelligence feeds. As a cloud service, FWaaS automatically receives updates for new IPS signatures and threat intelligence.
Furthermore, because these engines operate at the organization’s cloud layer, these threat intelligence feeds are applied instantly across the entire network, eliminating patch lag and configuration drift.
Secure Access Everywhere
Whether traffic originates from a branch office, home network, or mobile endpoint, FWaaS is able to apply the same inspection and control policies. Some FWaaS providers provide tunneling protocols that allow remote users to connect from home devices. This functionality is provided by an SD-WAN client or a VPN, by establishing a secure, encrypted tunnel that directs all traffic through the FWaaS provider’s cloud infrastructure. This routing ensures that all traffic is inspected for threats and policy compliance, regardless of user location.
Integrated Identity and Application Awareness
Modern FWaaS use cases integrate with identity providers (IdPs) like Azure AD, Okta, or Google Workspace. When users log in, authentication requests are redirected to the IdP, which verifies the user’s identity and sends an assertion back to FWaaS.
This allows modern FWaaS to implement and enforce policies depending on the specific user in question. After authentication, FWaaS maps the authenticated user and their group or roles to corresponding firewall policy rules. This allows the firewall to become a key component of a customer’s Identity Access Management enforcement.
Alongside identity awareness, FWaaS offers application-layer visibility. Because FWaaS sits at the forefront of a network’s activity, it’s able to build behavioral profiles for each app or service. Over time, it’s able to apply pattern-matching and signature-based classification engines that catalog known application behaviors and signatures. These are maintained in an application system cache, which then offers rapid recognition of applications mid-traffic flow.
Support for Zero Trust and SASE Architectures
Rather than segmenting security applications into individual, isolated applications, Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture aims to converge networking and security functions into a unified, cloud-based framework—bringing together SD-WAN, FWaaS, Secure Web Gateway (SWG), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
FWaaS is fundamental to SASE thanks to its role enforcing security at the cloud edge – closer to the user rather than the data center – and its ability to ensure least-privilege access and continuous verification of identity, device posture, and session context.
Key Considerations When Adopting FWaaS
Since FWaaS is less of a single tool and more of an ongoing supplier partnership, it’s vital to be clear about your organization’s requirements before signing a contract.
- Pricing and Licensing Models: Compare pricing structures, including subscription/licensing fees, feature tiers, and whether the pricing scales predictably with usage and number of users. Different providers’ pricing can follow one of several models, including subscription-based, usage-based (pay-as-you-go), or hybrid approaches. Customers generally pay based on a combination of factors such as bandwidth consumed, number of users or devices protected, and specific features or service tiers chosen. Transparent pricing is essential to avoid unexpected costs.
- Centralized Management and Policy Consistency: FWaaS best practices demand regular policy attention – so look for a cloud-native FWaaS with a unified management console. This enables centralized policy creation, enforcement, and monitoring across all users, locations, and cloud environments. It drastically reduces the complexity of FWaaS management. Depending on how large your organization’s security team is, consider how important a customizable dashboard is – and whether the FWaaS can route security alerts to individual analysts according to their area of expertise. These customizability options could represent significant time savings for the teams that need it.
- Global PoP Locations: The provider should have an extensive network of PoPs that ensure low latency, high availability, and optimal performance for remote users and distributed offices. These PoPs should reflect the locations and countries of your own organization’s offices and employees.
- FWaaS SASE Integration: Assess how well the FWaaS integrates with any current networking technologies deployed within your own organizational networks. The third-party services you use may drastically change what FWaaS fits the best: list the identity/access management solutions in place, the applications used by employees, and the range of security solutions that you already have in place.
- Scalability and Performance: Understand how much the provider can scale with your traffic volumes or user bases – and nail down how these changes in volume could impact firewall performance and throughput. While you no longer require exact statistics, do consider future growth and throughput requirements over the next 3-5 years.
- Ease of Deployment and Management: Consider the provider’s onboarding process, ease of configuration, and availability of automation features. A user-friendly interface, easily-accessible reporting, and integratable log management allow for far greater operational efficiency. Reporting in particular allows security managers to assess how well the FWaaS is functioning, and which response areas could be improved.
- Support and SLAs: Finally, review the level of technical support included in the partnership: assess its availability (which should be 24/7), response times, and service-level agreements (SLAs) that specify uptime guarantees and resolution times. Verify the provider’s track record for reliability and customer service.
Secure Users from Anywhere with Check Point SASE
Check Point’s Harmony SASE delivers secure, high-performance connectivity through its Global Private Backbone: it builds private traffic highways that bypass the public internet and instill full-visibility protection. Users – whether in the office, at home, or on the move—connect seamlessly to the nearest Point of Presence (PoP) for minimal latency and a consistently smooth experience. By combining optimized network performance with global reach, Check Point’s SASE enhances workforce productivity while maintaining the security and resilience required for modern, distributed enterprises. Explore Check Point’s SASE solution for yourself with a demo.
Or, if you’re more focused on the intricacies of FWaaS, Check Point CloudGuard offers comprehensive, cloud-native security that seamlessly integrates with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Kubernetes workloads. Its context-aware threat prevention engine automatically adapts to dynamic cloud assets, stopping attacks before they spread. While many FWaaS tools can be difficult to price up, see exactly what you can expect with a pricing request.
