Högskolan i Skövde

In recent years, organizations have faced constant, emerging, and complex cyber threats that traditional and basic firewalls can no longer manage. Next-generation firewalls (NGFW) may provide an answer via deep packet inspection and advanced capabilities such as intrusion prevention and application-aware controls. This thesis, based on semi-structured interviews and a survey, examined NGFW adoption with sixteen cybersecurity professionals from organizations in healthcare, education, industry and IT. The participants outlined six recurring themes: motivations for NGFW adoption, how decisions were made, implementation, cost, challenges, and expectations. A principal issue expressed was the rising number of application layer attacks and the pressure of complying with standards. During the implementation process, many participants also responded that an easy collaboration with existing vendors was important. Most organizations described a gradual process, but most started with a pilot and managed two systems in parallel, also supported by vendor support; this all went relatively well. However, participants underlined the priority of training staff and tuning features within their new system. Routine concerns were migrating legacy rules and combating alert fatigue once all actions were completed. Although some of the participants were cautiously optimistic about recognizing the benefit of an AI-enhanced feature, it was the individual oversight of the experts that most favoured it. The lessons, experiences, and insights concepts that will result from this research may be beneficial and informative to other organizations that are beginning to deploy their own NGFW and to be useful in future research initiatives.