>>ALLEN SCHMIDT: There's always the fear of the call in the middle of the night.
I think it's more so the call that you don't get in the middle of the night: it's when
you don't know that something has happened in your network and the breach and the extraction
of the critical information in your company those are the things I think that customers
need to consider and they need to have the right systems to be able to detect it and
then to be able to re-mediate and roll back once they do detect it.
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>>DAN SIEBERT: Ten years ago I could put a firewall around somebody's network and that
was sufficient to protect them.
But now with the advanced threats that we're seeing in the world today and we're seeing
how our consumers are using that technology to the point where there's mobility and there's
cloud and there's different type of data access that users want to have 24-hour access to
the Next-Gen technology, the Next-Gen firewall is there to help us look at that data stream
and, again, to protect against those threats that necessarily we didn't even have five
years ago.
>>ALLEN SCHMIDT: The Next-Gen firewall came together when the processing power and the
firewalls became sufficient that you could start to do all of those in a single system.
But the key to being able to do that wasn't to try and put all of those into one box but
to do it intelligently to be able to examine traffic simultaneously in parallel and in
that way you're not consuming the path, you're not losing all of the processing by having
to do it individually sequentially.
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>>DAN SIEBERT: There's three leaders that I would point and a lot of it comes down to
the way the customers want to use that technology use the firewall.
There's Cisco, there's Palo Alto and there's Fortinet.
And here at CDW we'll generally sell all three of those and we work with all three of those
partners.
And a lot of times we'll work with our customers to understand their need and what fit we'll
take within their network.
Palo Alto, you know, they were pretty much the innovator of the Next-Gen space and coming
with that technology a lot of the other vendors have had to match speed with them.
And as you look at how those pieces and components fit into a customer's network, again, each
one's going to fit a little bit differently.
So from a Palo Alto side you're definitely looking at a better application type of visibility;
you're getting a better view into the known and unknown applications that filter in a
lot of our customer's networks.
At the same time Cisco has, you know, with their FirePOWER section on the phone, so they're
able to see very good into an IPS type of inspection so intrusion prevention and data
protection.
Fortinet on that side as well.
Fortinet is very good with their inspection tool and they have some of the best feeds
to cost in the market.
>>ALLEN SCHMIDT: I think the value of the Next-Gen firewall is the additional protection
it gives you at the internet edge.
But you can't just think about the internet edge as well: you've got the internal environment
as well creating enclave boundaries on the inside between the user and the data center.
But ultimately the value they provide are greater inspection, greater security, the
ability to identify, compromise or indications of attack that weren't possible before simple
by looking at stateful inspection.
CDW has a really strong professional services organization.
We've deployed parameter firewalls for companies from small to large across different industries
and so our expertise in deploying Next-Gen firewall and being able to build policy related
to malware, related to URL content, related to traditional stateful inspection has been
able to be applied at the internet edge certainly where it's required but also internally where
you're creating enclave boundaries between user access and data center.
There's a number of security zones where these can be applied and CDW has great expertise
in doing that.
>>DAN SIEBERT: You want to have multiple layers of your technology and sometimes you want
to use a similar vendor that's communicating with each other Cisco has a great architecture
of that.
It leverages a lot of different pieces but sometimes they're not always the best pieces
so you may look for a different product to leverage in with the existing technology you
have.
>>ALLEN SCHMIDT: Best of breed is something that people will go with but oftentimes it's
nice to have one consolidated solution so that you're able to bring in the information
of all parts and that they integrate with each other.
>>DAN SIEBERT: A lot of the hacks and stuff that you read in the paper it's whether it's
a Home Depot or the Equifax or any of the stuff that's out there the attacker was in
the network long before that detection had actually occurred.
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