Does the throughput match your business needs?

Throughput demands are a moving target. Yesterday’s high performance is today’s baseline. As your users, devices and applications increase, bandwidth demands intensify, especially with over 95% of web traffic now being encrypted.

Many industry-standard datasheets highlight firewall throughput with security features turned off. We focus on Threat Protection Throughput. Your firewall must decrypt and inspect traffic (SS/TLS 1.3) without becoming a bottleneck. If the hardware can’t handle deep packet inspection at speed, your team may be forced to disable security features just to maintain connectivity, leaving your organisation vulnerable.

What type of inspection do you require from your firewall?

Generic CPUs were never designed for the specialised task of real-time inspection. Much like modern gaming requires a specialised GPU to render complex graphics, modern security requires a specialised processing power to handle encrypted streams without causing latency.

Most businesses expect technology to last 3-5 years, yet many find themselves buying “bolt-on” tools or performance workarounds within 18 months.

Forecast your bandwidth requirements for three years, double it and then select a firewall that handles that volume comfortably. This prevents the “rip and replace” cycle that often occurs when a solution is chosen based on price alone.

How quickly and effectively can it analyse traffic for threats?

In an application-centric environment, speed is vital. Performance is dictated by the synergy between the device’s CPU and its underlying operating system. When evaluating a solution, our architects verify if the hardware is purpose-built for high-performance inspection or if it’s simply a generic processor being pushed beyond its design limits.

Do you want a multivendor or single vendor solution?

A Multivendor solution is a “best-of-breed” strategy that can be effective, but it often introduces management complexity. Without open APIs and deep integration, “vendor sprawl” fragments your visibility. Attackers often exploit the technical gaps between disconnected tools.

A singlevendor solution is built on a common operating system and can significantly reduce deployment time and human error. A deeply integrated system is often the most efficient way to achieve the automation needed for instant threat detection.

Our in-house architects remain vendor agnostic from our cybersecurity and networking vendor partners, ensuring that your architecture is sound. If you choose a single-vendor platform, we verify that every component meets our high standards for performance and isn’t just a “bundled” extra.

Non-negotiables for NGFWs

While some vendors love to promote “nice-to-have” features, your firewall must excel at these fundamentals:

• Decryption – To protect your network, a firewall must be able to read traffic, which means it must handle decryption and re-encryption in near real-time.
• Advanced Threat Protection – It must move beyond basic “signatures” to use AI and Machine Learning to identify zero-day threats.
• Content Filtering – Preventing users from reaching malicious sites is one of the most effective ways to stop ransomware before it starts.
• Endpoint Integration – Your firewall should have visibility into the health of connecting devices, ensuring they are patched and secure before granting access.
• Inline Sandboxing – Proactively holding suspicious files until they are proven safe is a critical defence against previously unknown threats.
• IoT Visibility – Automated discovery and segmentation for the growing number of smart devices on your network.
• Remote Access – Moving beyond basic VPNs to per-session user and application monitoring (ZTNA) ensures security regardless of where your staff are working.
• Secure SD-WAN – Natively supporting and securing your WAN connections to optimise user experience without compromising on protection.

Your Firewall Must Support a Larger Security Framework

At DS Total Solutions, we design security frameworks where every component, from the data centre to the remote laptop, works as an integrated whole. This approach keeps the Whole Life Cost (WLC) low. By reducing energy consumption, licensing complexity and management hours, our solutions are often more cost-effective over a 5-year period than “cheaper” alternatives that ignore long-term operational costs.