Between the last blog post and this one, I’ve moved from K-12 into Higher Education, at the first place in Sub-Saharan Africa to have Internet connectivity. This is a vastly different environment in some ways – in particular, firewalling is quite different. You’re dealing with a user population that is entirely adults. Some of those adults engage in legitimate research on things that some would consider a bad idea (malware) or “morally dubious” (porn, pop-up ads, etc.), or needs unfiltered traffic (network telescopes, honeypots, big data “science DMZs” ). The particular University I work at has generally had a liberal outlook with regards to personal freedoms (and concomitant responsibility) – I think that’s generally a good thing and exactly where higher education should be.
We’re currently looking at doing a hardware refresh of our ~7 year old enterprise firewalls – mainly because the support on the current solutions is eye-watering. The present solution works fine (although it has quite limited capacity for logging – about 8 hours of our traffic), and it’s approaching vendor EoL status. Interestingly, even moving to a newer (and, because Moore’s law, more performant) hardware platform from the same vendor saves us money over a number of years. So we’re thinking about what we need, and that’s prompted some musings about the state of firewalls…
