Firewalls been around for three decades, but they’ve evolved drastically to include features that used to be sold as separate appliances and to pull in externally gathered data to make smarter decisions about what network traffic to allow and what traffic to block.

Now just one indespensible element in an ecosystem of network defenses, the latest versions are known as enterprise firewalls or next-generation firewalls (NGFW) to indicate who should use them and that they are continually adding functionality.

What is a firewall?

A firewall is a network device that monitors packets going in and out of networks and blocks or allows them according to rules that have been set up to define what traffic is permissible and what traffic isn’t.

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Cisco’s Encrypted Traffic Analytics (ETA), a software platform that monitors network packet metadata to detect malicious traffic, even if its encrypted, is now generally available.

The company initially launched ETA in June, 2017 during the launch of its intent-based network strategy and it’s been in a private preview since then. Today Cisco rolled ETA out beyond just the enterprises switches it was originally designed for and made it available on current and previous generation data center network hardware too.

+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What is intent based networking? | Why intent based networking could be a big deal +

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Cisco’s DNA Center is a new network automation software that the company has positioned as the interface for its ambitious intent-based networking (IBN) strategy.

+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What is intent-based networking? | Why intent-based networking could be a big deal +

Launched in the summer of 2017, the IBN plan to build an intuitive network has a variety of components that include DNA Center, which is the provisioning dashboard for managing the campus and branch networks.

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VMware today released a new version of its NSX virtual networking software that aims to make it easier to manage network requirements of cloud-native and application-container-based applications.

The move represents the latest example of a network vendor evolving its automation tooling to operate in not just traditional data center and campus networks, but increasingly in cloud environments that cater to a faster-pace of application development.

+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What SDN is and where its going +

VMware has two separate versions of its software-defined networking (SDN) software. The more popular and widely-used version named NSX integrates with VMware’s vSphere virtualization management software and the company’s popular ESXi compute hypervisor.

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There’s been a resurgence in the IaaS cloud computing market in the past year of vendors talking more and more about hybrid cloud computing.

As the cloud market is maturing, users are crystalizing what workloads are best for public cloud and what will remain on premises or in a private cloud. At Amazon Web Service’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week, a big question heading into the show was: What would AWS say about hybrid?

+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: What is hybrid cloud computing? +

Hybrid has been somewhat of a taboo topic for AWS over the years. AWS CEO Andy Jassy has repeatedly maintained that “in the fullness of time” he expects most workloads will run in the public IaaS cloud. We’re not there yet, though. A 451 Research poll from last year found that just 6% of enterprise workloads are running in the cloud.

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As more organizations look to enable hybrid cloud computing, a big question remains: How do I connect my network to the cloud? This week Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services each released new products that make that process easier.

Google’s Dedicated Interconnect is now generally available

Dedicated Interconnect is an important way for customers to connect to the public cloud. It allows organizations to connect their on-premises resources to a colocation facility and then that co-lo facility has a direct network connection to the public cloud. Public IaaS cloud providers like Google want to give their customers access to fast connections to their cloud, but they don’t want to connect to each individual customer’s site, so they’ve created this co-lo based Interconnect. Google runs the Interconnect and offers either a 99.9 or 99.99% service level agreement. Google is working with a handful of colocation vendors as the middle-man, including Equinix, Digital Realty and Infomart.

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