Picking a managed firewall vendor

Firewall vendor marketing reads like a competitive acronym contest. NGFW, UTM, SASE, ZTNA, XDR. Most of it is real, some of it is just rebadged. The actual evaluation comes down to a handful of questions.

What to evaluate

• How does the policy editor work? Try it. Does it feel like something your team can live with?
• What is the visibility into traffic on a normal Tuesday? Can you see what applications your users are actually using?
• How does HA (high availability) work, and is the failover actually tested at the vendor's recommended interval?
• What is the remote access story? VPN, ZTNA, or both? How is it managed?
• What happens when the device's hardware fails? Replacement turnaround, RMA process, sparing strategy.

What to ignore

Magic-quadrant rankings. Vendor benchmarks. Anything that compares "throughput with all features enabled" without specifying what the features are. The right firewall is the one that fits your team and your traffic, not the one with the highest spec sheet number.