The future of the firewall

The humble firewall has come a long way since its origins in the 1980s. But the technology is undergoing a major change, driven by the twin impetuses of soaring bandwidth and the need to accommodate cloud computing platforms. Steve Gold looks at the firewall's future. One of the problems is that many types of network traffic now operate via Port 80 - originally used only for web pages. This has prompted a move away from simple traffic analysis to a pattern-matching model that identifies the applications generating or using the data packets. The cloud has an important part to play, although it isn't possible to simply move traditional firewall models into the cloud. Firewalls have come a long way since their origins in the late 1980s. The technology has developed greatly since then, but are firewalls capable of keeping pace both with the volume of traffic that goes through them today and how it's used? Or do we need to develop a new model entirely?