Ensuring Secure Data Transfers: Guards vs. Firewalls

Government and commercial entities are constantly on alert to prevent and fight against ongoing threats of cyber attacks. The dichotomy faced by today’s enterprises is that in order to protect themselves against these threats they must also increase collaboration and sharing of information across sensitivity levels within their own organizations, as well as across government and corporate boundaries. In light of this, network security is of paramount significance especially with the keen emphasis currently placed on secure collaboration and information sharing in an environment of increasing threats and vulnerabilities.

In this whitepaper, we will discuss how Forcepoint Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) provides some key network capabilities, though it fails to perform extensive inspection of data in transit for a wide variety of policies. Software guards, such as Forcepoint Data Guard, provide unparalleled capabilities to mitigate threats and implement the precise controls required an environment. We will take a closer look at both NGFW and Guards to help clarify when one is preferable to the other, as well as when it is wise to utilize both to provide complete protection.