Don’t underestimate the value of a managed next-generation firewall service in today’s complex threat environment.

It’s old news that cyber security teams consistently run ‘hot’ - working hard to defend multifaceted digital environments against increasingly complex threats, with restricted opportunities to recruit new experts due to the worldwide skills shortage. And, for most global organisations, it’s a given that bringing in managed service providers to ease the burden is essential.

In today’s operational landscape, the big question is which skills to convert to a managed service to bring maximum value to the IT team and the organisation – and time and again, firewalls are at the top of the list.  

As cyber security teams are asked to take on more tasks requiring a widening range of skills without recruiting any extra specialists, the list of reasons why it’s unsustainable to keep a resource-hungry capability like firewall management in-house grows.

• It’s an intense, continual task 
  The critical lines of defence created by firewalls are becoming increasingly complex to manage. It’s challenging to stay current with the fast-paced changes and adjustments required for firewall settings and rules to adapt effectively to new threats, network changes and a security environment that’s both disparate and fragmented. The risk of this leading to poor firewall hygiene and overlapping rules or an inconsistent level of protection is high. 

• Multiplicity adds complexity 
  The disparity of a mixed firewall estate with multiple vendors and contracts makes it difficult to achieve good visibility, deliver effective reporting or apply a single policy. It limits opportunities for policy automation and can put next-generation firewall capabilities out of reach. 

• Skills shortages are hitting hard 
  Without the correct expertise to fine-tune firewall capabilities, teams can underutilise or misconfigure them. This can lead to reactive rather than proactive management, increasing the likelihood of security gaps. And turning this situation around by recruiting hard-to-find cyber security experts and honing their skills is expensive. 

• Non-compliance penalties are growing 
  Maintaining compliance with an international mesh of legislation and regulators is onerous and becoming more challenging every day. Non-compliance consequences are severe, ranging from financial penalties to restrictions on operations and reputational damage. 

Opting for a managed firewall service rapidly sweeps responsibility for all these issues from your desk to that of your provider, which is a win in itself. Perhaps the most expected benefit of a managed firewall service is the capability to control and filter data coming in and out of the network. 

However, a managed firewall service also unlocks much broader possibilities. It’s a key step in consolidating your security technology to avoid gaps and accelerating your strategic goals. 

It allows you to standardise your security policy for consistency. And the single pane of glass visibility and control it delivers can help strengthen your security policy without adding difficulty for users, while also making regulatory compliance and reporting much more straightforward. 

On top of all this, a managed firewall service is also a strong enabler of secure third-party collaboration; you can give your partners access to your systems and the freedom to collaborate with your employees while preventing unauthorised access and data loss. 

All these benefits are firmly future-focused, preparing your cyber security to deal with any rapidly evolving risks on the horizon and beyond.

To keep our customers ahead of the game we invest in innovation, developing our own initiatives and creating solutions jointly within our strategic partnerships with industry leaders. We then take these innovations and wrap them into comprehensive managed services that mean our customers can achieve a consistent global experience easily, with the flexibility and choice they need. 

Our partnership with Cisco is the ideal combination of market-leading technology and our service wrap. The BT Managed Firewall, using Cisco Firepower™, brings together Cisco’s incredibly effective firewall with our extensive experience and advanced skills in delivering managed services, plus our deep knowledge of the Cisco portfolio. When security teams are stretched in terms of time and skills, we take every aspect of management off their shoulders. 

Thanks to its advanced design, the Cisco firewall delivers a highly effective balance of granular application control and robust security against the threats posed by sophisticated and evasive malware attacks. Its unified policy management of firewall functions, application control, threat prevention and advanced malware protection from the network to the endpoint contributed to Forrester naming Cisco a Leader in Enterprise Firewall Solutions, Q4 2024.

• Stop more threats by containing known and unknown malware with leading Cisco AMP and sandboxing, firewalling for 7,300 commercial applications, and additional custom applications.

• Gain more insight into your environment with next-generation Cisco IPS, which includes automated risk rankings and impact flags to identify priorities for your team.

• Detect earlier and act faster with an infection-to-detection time of just a few hours.

• Reduce complexity with unified management and automated threat correlation across tightly integrated security functions, including application firewalling and advanced malware protection. 

• Reduce performance costs and increase visibility by inspecting encrypted traffic for malicious content, without the need to decrypt using Cisco’s Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE).

• Get more from your network and existing investments with optional integration of other Cisco and third-party networking and security solutions to enhance your security.

In addition, Cisco firewalls benefit from Cisco Talos, a threat intelligence service provided by Cisco that feeds directly into them. This allows them to identify and block malicious traffic based on real-time threat data collected by Talos. Using this intelligence effectively enhances the firewall's protection by providing up-to-date information about known threats like malware, phishing sites and botnets; essentially, Talos acts as the ‘brain' behind the firewall's decision-making process to block suspicious traffic.  

Our extensive experience in providing managed services guides you through the consideration, selection and implementation of your chosen service from our range of scalable, BT-owned on-premises CPE solutions. The strength of this process is part of why we’re consistently voted as a leader in network and security managed services by Gartner and IDC. 

The streamlined journey to one of our managed services starts with a controlled deployment phase to agreed timescales, where we set up, configure and tune your choice of service tier. After a seamless on-boarding process, our experts then monitor your live service proactively, 24x7x365 and, in the event of any faults, our engineers will identify them faster than if you went directly to the vendor. You’ll also have access to our secure portal to request any changes and obtain reports on system health and threat activity. 

On an ongoing basis, our trusted security professionals will assess your service's effectiveness and recommend amendments that can further optimise your firewall performance. They’ll also undertake all change management, vulnerability management, renewals, licensing and patching. And your whole experience will be backed up with strong SLAs for availability. 

Contact your account manager to learn more about how a managed firewall service can make defending your organisation easier.