The Performance Penalties of Bloatware-Based Next-Gen Firewalls

By Mike Fey/ Posted on 10/30/2014
 
Why some organizations turn off critical security features to maintain network QoS.
 At last month’s Oracle OpenWorld 2014, Intel president Renee James spoke of the need to eliminate the “performance penalties” of today’s most urgently needed applications and services. Oftentimes, such penalties result from the practice of bolting new hardware or software onto legacy solutions to address new issues. A “bloatware” effect emerges, where the new unwieldy solutions take their toll on an enterprise in the form of management complexity and performance degradation.
Two recent studies suggest that in the critical area of next-generation firewalls, some firewall designs inflict performance penalties so pronounced that organizations resort to turning key security features off. The features are the incremental next-generation capabilities that allow firewall product-marketing departments to keep up with the latest craze, and supposedly move firewalls past the basics of deny/allow. Essentially, those next-gen firewall features are now relegated back to what they were originally -- or even worse, shelfware. Sadly, this also makes an organization look silly: If all the features need to be turned off to maintain performance, why was the investment made in the first place?
 
 
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