Quality of Service: A Next Generation Firewall Must-Have Feature

NEXT GENERATION FIREWALL MUST-HAVE FEATURES

PART 1: QUALITY OF SERVICE

In today’s digital age, security has become tantamount to success in ensuring business continuity. That said, ensuring that the latest and greatest security measures are in place on a network’s perimeter security appliance is crucial in ensuring a healthy and vulnerability-free network. In this blog, the NG or “Next Generation” firewall will be showcased to underscore some of the top modern-day features that should be taken into consideration when purchasing or refreshing a new firewall. These features will reduce the probability of successful attack, consolidate feature-sets, and ensure an optimal network. 

QUALITY OF SERVICE

Quality of Service is becoming increasingly more important with the transition to a hybridized environment that includes both on-premise and cloud-based applications. Network connections that require a high-degree of quality such a VoIP traffic greatly benefit from QOS priority mapping. Most “NG” firewalls have the ability to detect application sets or static rules that apply priorities to specific types of network traffic. 

A VoIP call that connects to a cloud-based PBX typically requires a constant connection without degradation to be jitter and delay free. Common issues without QOS in place would result in poor voice quality, picture quality (if a conference call), or latency in sound delivery. A good QOS policy will ensure VoIP packets are given a higher priority and dedicated bandwidth as not to interfere with other types of traffic. Environments that are overutilizing bandwidth can benefit from assigning higher priority values to sensitive traffic types. 

Stay tuned next week for Part 2: SSL Decryption