The level of protection a firewall appliance provides is limited to its physical capacity. Protecting increased traffic loads, for instance, entails additional processing and requires spending time and resources on forced upgrades. This capacity limitation often forces IT to choose cost efficiency over security, resulting in a low security posture.

Delivered as a cloud service, FWaaS removes all appliance capacity concerns, and eliminates the hassle associated with upgrading multiple firewalls. With Xcellhost’s scalable and elastic cloud infrastructure, IT can protect all resources without legacy firewall capacity limitations and maintain an optimal security posture.

Appliance-based security inherently entails distributed deployments and disparate security policies. As a result, IT is forced to allocate valuable time and effort to manage the network life cycle; including manually sizing, deploying, configuring, patching and upgrading firewall appliances across multiple sites.

Xcellhost connects the entire organization to a single, logical global FWaaS with a unified application-aware security policy. Maintenance of the service is done by Xcellhost, so IT can manage the business-specific security policy, without wasting time on manually handling multiple firewall appliances, their software, and their configuration.

Managing optimal security posture is a big challenge. For example, appliance-based IPS requires heavy involvement from IT. As an IPS vendor distributes new signatures, IT must assess their relevance and impact on performance, then test them on live traffic for false positives and end user disruption, and finally, deploy them in full production mode. This resource impact causes many IT teams to essentially ignore IPS updates, weakening their network security posture.

Xcellhost uniquely delivers Firewall and IPS as a managed solution, freeing IT from the burden of security posture maintenance. Xcellhost evaluates emerging threats and develops the rules to stop them. Xcellhost then tests these rules in simulation mode on live traffic, ensuring enterprises aren’t impacted and eliminating false positives before rolling them out. As a result, threats are prevented and stopped without overloading IT.