Will 'WildFire' be the future face of firewalls?

PHUKET, THAILAND: Early this month, US based Palo Alto Networks' introduced its next generation firewall — WildFire.

This latest security product is built with an integrated approach to address the full malware life cycle from preventing infections, identifying unknown or targeted malware as well as pinpointing and disrupting any active infections.

According to Nir Zuk, Palo Alto Network's founder and CTO, the network security market is estimated around $8-10 billion globally. Traditionally, the market of network security is largely dominated around web, email and internet security.

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“But blocking web applications is not enough for security today because you can get threats from other web applications such as WebEx, Instant Messenger (IM), Skype, Microsoft SharePoint, Facebook and others,” Zuk said.

“Our next generation firewall (WildFire) takes the network security to a new level and expands to the internet, web mail, instant messengers and web applications,” he added.

Quoting a Gartner predictions, Zuk pointed that WildFire is replacing the traditional firewalls and claimed, “Palo Alto's firewall will have 60 percent market share by 2014.”

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Interesting, Palo Alto Networks is relatively a new player in the network security market  however within six years in the industry, company has generated over $200 million revenues with 5000 plus customers globally.

“Competitors offer security only for internet, emails or web by blocking web  applications, but we have found ways to secure web applications rather then block them,”  Zuk commented on how WildFire's technology is advance than other vendor's firewalls.

“We are the first firewall vendor to bring out the targeted attack solutions, while the industry is good at wild attacks,” he claimed.

Further Zuk argued that VPN was developed some 15 years ago — when there was no Wi-Fi connectivity, but today there's Wi-Fi.

“Palo Alto Network's VPN security creates a virtual private cloud and protects data via  our firewalls, which provides security not only at network level but also protects against data center leakage, exploits and targeted attacks,” he added.      

The former CheckPoint engineer, at age of 16 started writing viruses however he soon realized his future was in developing security software and technology. And that's how Zuk started Palo Alto Networks with the help of 25 people and raised $ 9.4 million.

“Problem is that the world doesn't have enough researchers and security analysts which can detect and monitor targeted attacks,” Zuk observed.

(Author was hosted by NetEvents APAC & Analyst Press Summit in Phuket, Thailand)