What is a cloud native firewall?

Most organizations now run more than half of their workloads on public clouds, leveraging the agility and scalability of the cloud to meet rapidly evolving business demands. However, as workloads move to the cloud, networks become more decentralized—and more difficult to secure. Ensuring consistent protection of your cloud resources significantly benefits from a cloud-native solution.

A cloud native firewall (CNF) is a managed cloud network security solution delivered as a service that scales to demand, is highly available within cloud regions and across availability zones, and does not require maintenance by customers. A cloud native firewall allows you to define and assign policies that protect selected networks and cloud compute resources without having to configure, provision, or maintain any firewall software infrastructure.

Benefits

• Scalability: Cloud-native firewalls like FortiGate CNF can scale up or down quickly to accommodate changing workload demands.

• Flexibility: Cloud-native firewalls are designed to work seamlessly in cloud environments, providing flexibility in terms of deployment and management.

• Security: Cloud-native firewalls provide advanced security capabilities to protect workloads against a wide range of threats and vulnerabilities.

• Egress security: Cloud-native firewalls like FortiGate CNF provide robust egress security capabilities to help prevent data exfiltration and ensure the confidentiality of cloud data.

• Visibility: Cloud-native firewalls provide real-time visibility into cloud network traffic, allowing organizations to identify potential security threats and take proactive measures to mitigate them.

• Compliance: Cloud-native firewalls help organizations meet regulatory compliance requirements by providing advanced security and auditing capabilities.

• Integration: Cloud-native firewalls can integrate with other security solutions and cloud platforms, enabling organizations to create a comprehensive security ecosystem.

• Automation: Cloud-native firewalls like FortiGate CNF can be easily automated, allowing organizations to streamline their security operations and reduce the risk of human error.

• Performance: Cloud-native firewalls are optimized for cloud environments, providing high-performance security and networking capabilities that are essential for modern cloud workloads.

• Cost-effectiveness: Cloud-native firewalls can be more cost-effective than traditional firewalls, as they are designed to work seamlessly in cloud environments and can be scaled up or down as needed, reducing the need for expensive hardware or software licenses.

Intended audience

This guide is written primarily for users of public cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), who are interested in protecting their cloud networks and have an understanding of public cloud networking and security concepts.

For cloud native firewall security policy implementation, you should also have working knowledge of FortiOS policy configuration.

About this guide

This guide provides an introductory overview of public cloud firewall concepts and introduces Fortinet’s FortiGate Cloud Native Firewall (CNF) solution. Industry standard terminologies are used, with introductions to Fortinet specific terms, concepts, and technologies. You can move on to the FortiGate CNF Architecture Guide when you are familiar with the concepts and terminology and to the FortiGate CNF Deployment Guide when you are ready to explore cloud deployment options.