What to Look for When Buying a Firewall for an Enterprise Network

I’ve been in this game a long time—back when networking meant fighting PSTN lines and praying that your multiplexer didn’t spontaneously go off the deep end. I’ve witnessed attacks rise and fall, from the Slammer worm detonating worldwide to the astonishingly intricate ransomware gangs of today.

Now, if you do have a large-scale enterprise network, your firewall is your first big line of defense. And I mean major—we’re talking high-traffic, mission-critical, we cannot afford downtime environments. So how do you choose the right one?

Let’s break this down.

Quick Take

If you’re pressed for time (and honestly, who isn’t):

• Performance King – If your firewall can’t keep up, it’s beyond useless.
• Enterprise-grade security – IPS, DDoS protection, sandboxing, SSL inspection.
• Scalability – Your business is not static. Your firewall shouldn’t be either.
• Zero-trust integration – Because the perimeter is no longer what it was.
• Vendor reliability – Must be strong in support and patching.

Now, let’s dive into the stages of it.

Enterprise Firewall Needs

The thing is—firewalls are no longer simple devices that block traffic, as they did back in the ‘90s. A baseline requirement of an enterprise firewall is to be:

• Fast, scalable, and highly available – If you are safeguarding a bank or a data center, you cannot afford bottlenecks.
• Deep packet inspection capable – Nowadays attackers don’t just dance through open ports.
• Intelligent with threat feeds & intelligence – Signature prefetching, anomaly detection using machine learning (not those AI-buzzword snake oil).
• Flexible with deployment – Cloud-native, a blend of both, or completely on-premise, your setup can be adapted to fit your architecture.

And zero trust? Yeah, that’s no longer optional. We can no longer assume internal traffic is safe — I’ve seen far too many insider threat cases to the contrary.

Performance & High Availability

This is an understatement: if your firewall is slowing down your business, it is causing more harm than good.

You’re dealing with:

• Massive traffic volumes — financial institutions, healthcare backbones, government networks.
• AirTight everywhere—if your firewall can’t lead through SSL/TLS quickly, it simply cannot detect the majority of threats.
• Latency-sensitive applications — VoIP, financial transactions, cloud services.

So, what do you need?

• High throughput with low latency – Hardware acceleration (ASICs, FPGA-based offloading) can be a game changer.
• Load balancing & clustering – You need redundancy. You need redundancy.
• Built-in protection against DDoS – Not an afterthought bolt-on—native protection that stops volumetric attacks early.

I’ve witnessed firewalls fall over under extreme load during network floods that beget ransomware. You don’t want to learn about the failure mode of your firewall when there is an actual attack in progress.

Capabilities to Prevent Threats

Now, we’re getting into what I refer to as the real test of a firewall — how well it protects your network against the constantly evolving nightmare of cyber threats.

Corporate traffic protection minimum requirements:

• Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) — Gone are the days of port-based filtering.
• IPS – With updated signatures and anomaly detection.
• Sandboxing for advanced malware detection – Unsurprisingly, if your firewall isn’t already analyzing suspicious binaries in a sandboxed environment, you are behind the curve.
• SSL/TLS decryption and inspection – Since so many attacks are encrypted nowadays.

And I know people hate SSL inspection because of the performance hits—but if it’s done properly, it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.

I recently assisted three banks in configuring their firewall setups to properly inspect encrypted traffic. The before-and-after results? Night and day. They’re now intercepting threats that were previously getting through… and not sacrificing performance.

Fortinet Enterprise Solutions at PJ Networks

This is where we come in. Enterprise security environments have been examined piecemeal by my team and I for years, and the Fortinet Solutions have been a rock in the world of high-availability, high-performance firewalling.

Why Fortinet?

• You cannot match these kinds of performance using software-based solutions alone–Purpose-built ASIC hardware.
• Integrated threat intelligence – Pulls directly from real-time updates from FortiGuard Labs.
• Flexible deployment — On-prem? Cloud? Hybrid? No problem.
• Zero-trust integration – Necessary for 21st-century networks.
• Flash servers for virtualization – With built-in SD-WAN and security. Doesn’t require hardware on-prem SD-WAN.

I personally managed deployments where other large organizations required uniform security for geographically diverse sites. Not all vendors have managed to tighten security while improving performance; with Fortinet’s solutions we’ve managed to do both.

Conclusion

Selecting the appropriate firewall for a large enterprise network is more than just completing a feature checklist—it’s knowing your actual environment, the threats you will expose yourself to, and the performance you expect.

Here are some of the things I tell every enterprise client that is on the hunt for a next-gen firewall:

1. Build for scale — If your business expands, will your security architecture follow?
2. Performance vs security – You don’t have to trade one for the other; you can have both. But you have to have the right solution.
3. Prepare for the worst – Security isn’t just about prevention, but rapid detection & response.

And if you’re still unsure? Call me. I’ve been doing this since the days when dial-up was cutting-edge — I can help you avoid winding up with a solution that sounds great in theory but won’t work in practice when you need it the most.