NGFW boom increasing burden on Infosec workers

Adoption of next-generation firewalls can come at detriment of the workload of IT security staff, research finds

Adoption of next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) may be soaring but end users making the leap could well encounter increased workloads as a result.

That is according to research from firewall management vendor Algosec designed to gauge the effects that NGFWs are having on IT security professionals' workloads.

According to Gartner's 2013 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewall s, less than 10 per cent of internet connections are currently secured using NGFWs. The market watcher expects this to rise to 35 per cent of the installed base by 2014, with 60 per cent of new purchases being NGFWs.

Just over a third (36 per cent) of the 130 European IT security professionals quizzed in Alogsec's study said they have implemented an NGFW.

Of those to have adopted one, 52.4 per cent said their objective is to cut IT spend, with 42.9 per cent saying their goal is to improve protection from attacks. Lesser reasons for adoption included wanting to gain control over access to internal applications (28.6 per cent) and improving control over external apps and/or enabling BYOD policies (26.2 per cent).

But these perceived benefits can come at a cost, the research found, with adoption of NGFWs often found to add to the end user's workload.

The majority of respondents (57.1 per cent) who had adopted NGFWs said they added more work to the firewall management process. Some 69.8 per cent said they must make more changes to their NGFWs than traditional firewalls.

"While added experience with NGFWs should eventually translate to reduced management burden and cost, the complexity of these systems will likely mean additional work for many organisations for several years to come," the report stated.

According to the study, the top NGFW features turned on are IPS and application control, which were both used by 48.9 per cent of respondents.

The study was conducted at this year's Infosecurity Europe show in April, meaning that about 80 per cent of respondents were British IT security professionals. A sister survey carried out in North America found that NGFW adoption there stood at more than 50 per cent.