A Simpler and More Profitable Firewall Service
automation is baked into your managed VFS, the migration of firewalls from physical to virtual is quicker and more reliable—you don’t have to devote hours of engineering expertise or worry about human error. As well as automated deployments, you get push-button provisioning. In other words, the scaling and optimizing of on-premise virtual firewalls happens automatically, meaning your customer support team can spin up these services the same day without in-depth training or engineering capability. Provisioning and management are cloud-like, creating an intuitive and familiar UI that simplifies all the complex operations your support team must take care of.
Intelligent orchestration to transform your environment
There is one other factor you need for your new firewall service to be simpler and more profitable—intelligent orchestration. Intelligent orchestration is a powerful tool that allows you to visualize and control your virtual network firewalls across all on-premise environments. It automates the full lifecycle from deploy to scale to optimize, including licensing, zero-touch deployment, maintenance, troubleshooting, and machine intelligence.
The ability to view all resources in a single UI gives you end-to-end visibility and control from one console. It serves up a consolidated view of all the compute servers and virtual machines and their state, for example: the overall health of the system, server resource allocation, VMs and network utilization. The “intelligence” comes from the recommendations on the best allocation of virtual firewalls in the context of your entire deployment, including automated scaling.
Intelligent orchestration makes it very simple to add new virtual firewalls, change existing ones, and adjust resources without the need for additional DevOps work. This enables IT teams to automate tasks across multiple platforms, making your team nimbler when responding to change. And it brings predictability to managing the virtual infrastructure in your clients’ networks.
The benefits of a hosted managed virtual firewall service
When SPs and MSSPs offer a hosted managed VFS, they gain incredible service velocity, agility, and profitability. With automation and intelligent orchestration, you can add or remove virtual firewalls as needed with the click of a button, so your network firewall service becomes a quick and easy customer support function instead of a big engineering project. And with multi-tenancy, you get flexibility and portability across environments for an even more agile service.
But it’s not just about speed and agility; you can also reduce your network operations expenses, resulting in a better ROI. First, you don’t have to invest in physical hardware, or the licenses and support over the life of the hardware. Second, you save on costly and scarce DevOps resources to develop, test, and maintain physical hardware, or to complete a DIY virtualization project. Finally, with a pay-as-you-grow model that optimizes credit-based licensing, you only pay for the capacity and firewall licenses you need, and you don’t have to plan overcapacity into your purchases or architecture.
Enterprises are looking for a firewall service that can effectively protect them from the latest cyberattacks today and grow with their organization’s ever-changing needs, without draining engineering resources or their bank balance. Service providers and managed security service providers have an opportunity to plug the gap by taking this engineering headache from their customers with a hosted managed virtual firewall service. The key is to leverage the benefits of automation and intelligent orchestration so that this new virtualized service is quicker to deploy, offers more agility and delivers increased profitability—all while delivering best-in-class threat prevention.
