Managed firewall services include a third-party provider who configures, monitors, and maintains a business's firewalls on their behalf. These services include real-time threat detection, policy enforcement, patch management, and compliance reporting.
Firewalls still serve a critical function across multiple verticals. They block known threats and can detect anomalous behavior. While they can struggle to keep up with modern threats, like Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) and data theft, they still provide a valuable layer of security that businesses should be hesitant to discard without a proper replacement.
The Hidden Cost of DIY Firewalls
Many IT teams take a do-it-yourself approach to firewall management, relying on internal staff to handle maintenance and continued monitoring. While this might seem efficient on paper, there are drawbacks. Misconfigured rules can lead to security gaps, outdated firmware can leave you vulnerable to threats that should have been patched, and a lack of continuous oversight leads to increased chances of something going wrong.
Managing firewalls in isolation ignores the broader context of network performance. Latency, dropped packets, or routing issues aren’t always security problems—but without unified oversight of both firewall and transport, it's hard to tell where the issue lies.
Unlike many standalone Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs), Hughes combines firewall management with direct control over the underlying transport network. This end-to-end visibility reduces guesswork. Thanks to the increased visibility, Hughes can accelerate root cause analysis and ensure that performance is optimized.
What to Look for in a Managed Firewall Provider
Selecting the right partner for firewall management is about finding a provider that aligns with your operational risk and has experience managing network architectures.
At a minimum, your provider should offer:
- 24x7 monitoring and response, not just log collection
- Threat intelligence feeds that evolve with new risks
- Custom policy tuning based on your specific traffic and risk profile
- Compliance reporting for standards like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOC 2
- Scalable support for growing or distributed environments
Bonus points go to providers that can integrate with SD-WAN or SASE, ensuring firewall management doesn't become a silo.
Why Firewall Services Are Foundational to SASE
SASE is a security architecture designed to address today’s distributed workforce and cloud-first environments. It brings together networking (SD-WAN) and security services (ZTNA, CASB, FWaaS) into a unified, cloud-delivered framework.
But the foundation of SASE still rests on firewall services, whether it's deployed on-prem, at the edge, or in the cloud. Firewalls remain the control point for traffic entering or leaving a network, enforcing policies and filtering out known threats.
A helpful analogy: think of your managed firewall as just the security guard at the front gate. SASE, by comparison, would be the whole security force, spread throughout every room and hallway of your organization. One secures the perimeter, while the other scales security across users, apps, and endpoints. Organizations that already rely on managed firewall services are in a strong position to adopt SASE gradually.
Hughes Managed Firewalls: End-to-End Protection
Most MSSPs manage firewalls as an overlay, disconnected from the transport paths that actually move data between locations, users, and applications. This creates silos. And when something breaks, it leads to finger-pointing between network and security teams.
Hughes takes a different approach. As both a connectivity provider and a managed firewall provider, Hughes operates the entire stack, from the WAN link to the firewall policy. That means:
- Faster troubleshooting when performance or security is impacted
- Tighter integration of monitoring, alerts, and analytics
- Fewer false positives and unnecessary escalations
Hughes delivers what many others can’t: a converged experience where network performance and security outcomes are aligned by design, not bolted on after the fact.
Firewalls may no longer be the flashiest tool in the cybersecurity arsenal, but their role has never been more important.
If your organization is interested in managed firewalls, or if you are considering a transition to cloud-delivered firewalls as part of a larger SSE or SASE infrastructure, learn more and reach out to our experts.