We’ve evolved from the stateful firewall which filters bi-directional traffic streams as whole, requiring users to write policies only for outgoing traffic, to the next-generation firewall (NGFW), which supports more granular filtering and deep packet inspection to identify application-specific traffic, not just network protocols and port numbers. The adoption of virtualized datacenters lead to the development of virtualized firewalls, adding even more devices that need to be managed.

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