Hybridization of enterprise IT is now a fact, so CISOs and cybersecurity leaders must create a security framework to address these increasingly distributed, dynamic, and complex environments. As workloads are distributed across the full architectural spectrum comprising campus, branch, data center, colos and cloud locations, security teams must protect them everywhere. They also must confront and overcome performance challenges, since deeper inspection adds latency, which impacts user experience. Additionally, they must cope with legacy security models, where best-of-breed solutions often create policy drift and leave gaps in traffic inspection and enforcement.
Adding artificial intelligence (AI) to the mix increases complexity and urgency. Applications such as large-language models (LLMs), while offering exciting potential, also represent new threats in the form of Frontier AI models. The result: In the AI era, security effectiveness and network performance must advance together, not trade off against each other.
This shift is changing how security teams view the firewall, long a foundation of cybersecurity infrastructure in the enterprise. Research shows that 79% of enterprises are concerned that their firewall architectures must be modernized to keep pace with evolving business needs.
Hybrid mesh firewalls centralize control for distributed security frameworks
Traditional, fixed-perimeter cyber defenses, have been replaced by edge infrastructure, cloud gateways, AI models, SaaS applications, and a countless number of smart devices. Instead of authoring security policies for, multiple security controls on the network using multiple tools , organizations seek solutions that treat access control, detection, and policy enforcement in a holistic, unified manner. That’s where Hybrid Mesh Firewalls (HMFs) come into play.
“As organizations scale AI, security can no longer operate as a collection of isolated controls,” said Kedar Dhuru, vice-president for security at HPE Networking. “HMF becomes the enforcement layer of the self-driving network, combining centralized intelligence and unified policy with autonomous protection to secure every user, every workload, and every connection across the enterprise.”
A key benefit of HMFs is the ability to simplify network security architecture by curtailing the ad hoc evolution toward multiple firewall providers and disparate management tools. Research from Omdia notes that 89% of enterprises are using multiple firewall providers and multiple security products, creating a web of complexity and potential vulnerabilities that must be addressed in order to improve end-to-end security posture.
“The firewall is no longer simply guarding the network’s entrance,” noted Dhuru. “It is becoming a distributed security control within the network itself.”
HMFs deliver a broad spectrum of benefits before, during, and after breaches take place. For instance, pre-breach benefits include unifying policy centrally and identifying lateral-movement blind spots; this is essential, since attackers now favor east-west attacks across the network. Organizations also can use HMFs to consolidate proliferating and often-conflicting policies and rules, while also reducing the potential for impacts on application development cycles.
Additionally, HMFs protect the rapidly expanding data center edge, using the same security stack to protect application workloads with virtual firewalls and container-based firewalls—all managed from a single console and sharing the same policies.
During breach attempts, the segmentation across the full range of devices, applications, and data sources enables the HMF to efficiently contain the “blast radius.” It also helps reduce the need for cross-team reconciliation of policy enforcement through efficient coordination to significantly reduce response time.
After a breach occurs, HMFs help reduce the risk of regulatory compliance violations by enforcing policy consistently throughout the enterprise, regardless of data source or infrastructure model. Post-incident forensic analysis also is simplified and done faster by eliminating the need to reconcile data among infrastructure, applications, and physical locations.
What to look for in a solution
As organizations intensify their efforts to put in place a plan to reduce security gaps and improve their chances for autonomous protection, there are some key capabilities they should look for in a solution.
- The firewall itself must be viewed within a broader context. It is important to keep in mind that networks and security models need to work together. In a self-driving architecture, the network infrastructure (routers, switches, access points, and firewalls) contributes telemetry and participate in enforcement. This allows organizations to enforce security closer to the user, applications, and data.
- HMFs should be the backbone of a single security foundation across all form factors. It needs to be designed for a unified architecture, comprising of a common security stack, a unified policy model, and centralized management
- Centralized intelligence with distributed enforcement. The platform should apply consistent security policies across users, applications, workloads, and locations from a single management framework.
- Commitment to AI for Security to achieve improved protection and enhanced efficiency. Done right, AI becomes a strategic asset for enterprise security, reducing risk and simplifying operators’ workloads. AI for Security enables organizations to facilitate the goal of autonomous protection and more efficient, reliable, and wide-ranging threat detection.
- Uncompromised performance, resilience, and efficacy that are independently demonstrated. The firewall must support critical security services at scale under real-world traffic conditions without degrading throughput, availability, user experience, or security efficacy.
- A commitment to open architecture, automation, and cloud-native operations. An HMF must fit into existing operational models throughout an organization’s IT ecosystem. Autonomous operations are a key indispensable feature of HMFs . “With attacks operating at the speed of the network, defenses cannot depend entirely on human-speed investigation and policy updates,” said Dhuru. Organizations should embrace the concept of AI for security operations (AI SecOps), where AI is used to simplify and expedite the overall security operations.
- Proactive and continuous assurance. Within a complex, distributed hybrid deployment environment, the HMF needs to provide continuous assessment and assurance across multiple dimensions: security controls, devices, network interconnectivity, and applications.
How HPE delivers on the HMF promise
HPE Networking’s mission is to deliver a self-driving network across your branch, campus, data center and cloud native environments. This self-driving network and HMF converge on shared telemetry and coordinated security enforcement to create a self-protecting network. Network and security operate more effectively from a common context, while controls can be applied at the most efficient point rather than forcing all network traffic through a distant or centralized inspection location.
HPE seamlessly integrates networking and security across routing, switching, and firewall domains. Industry-leading SRX firewalls, validated through independent efficacy testing, deliver high-confidence threat prevention, while deep integrations with NETCONF, open APIs, automation tools, and CI/CD workflows simplify operations and accelerate deployments.
HPE’s business and technical consultants regularly advise enterprise clients with complex, mission-critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities on designing and deploying self-driving networks built around HMFs and other sophisticated tools and security services.
