It should have died years ago. Yet the firewall remains. Here’s why.

By Chandrodaya Prasad, Chief Product Officer, Sonicwall

In the early 2000s, application-layer awareness was supposed to make packet inspection obsolete. The rise of mobile devices was supposed to dissolve the perimeter. Cloud adoption was supposed to make on-premises appliances irrelevant. Zero Trust sealed the deal: the firewall was a relic of a security philosophy built for a world that no longer existed.

Today, the global firewall market is valued at roughly $6 billion and growing. Enterprise refresh cycles are active. Mid-market and small- to medium-sized business (SMB) deployments keep expanding. For a technology declared dead more times than any other in security, the firewall has a remarkable record of surviving its own obituaries.

The question worth asking isn’t whether the firewall is dead. It’s why every generation of security innovation has failed to kill it, what that tells us about the nature of network security ...