True Costs Of Enterprise Firewall Refreshes

Forbes

23-05-2025

Mickey Singh is a senior leader at Versa Networks, renowned for his proven track record in commercializing emerging technologies.
Investing in technology is crucial for businesses to protect their networks, data, devices and users from external threats. Depending on which source you look at, most experts suggest a firewall refresh every five to seven years.
A five-year refresh cycle is just about right for most organizations. Wait too long, and you might fall behind on the latest cybersecurity threats or miss out on improved performance. Jump in too soon, and you could end up spending more than necessary.
The following factors may dictate the need for a refresh of firewalls:
• Increased Security Threats: To combat evolving cyber threats, it's essential to stay ahead of cybercriminals who continually find new ways to exploit vulnerabilities.
• Demand For Higher Performance: As cloud and SaaS adoption grows, older firewalls may struggle to meet increased throughput demands.
• End-Of-Support (EOS): Firewall manufacturers frequently declare EOS dates for their older appliances, indicating that they will cease providing updates, support and replacement parts.
• Staying Ahead Of Technology: Existing hardware may not be able to support advanced security functions like advanced threat protection (ATP) or innovative technologies, such as AI.
Keeping up with technology isn't cheap. For decades, firewall vendors have relied on constant refresh cycles to maintain their profit pools. Why do vendors want to push for renewals?
• Increased Revenue: Every refresh creates a revenue opportunity for a vendor to push for a "like-for-like" upgrade. But if your needs have changed, you need to look at newer architecture.
• Transition To Subscription Models: Vendors are motivated to shift to a recurring revenue model.
• Bundled Services: A firewall refresh can be used as a means to bundle (or seemingly give away) additional services such as SD-WAN, ATP, IoT security, etc.
• Renegotiate Agreements: Refresh cycles open an opportunity to renegotiate license agreements. This can lock in customers for extended periods and increase revenue.
Such strategies enable firewall vendors to capitalize on the enterprise need for updated security infrastructure in an ever-evolving security landscape. For example, in its Q1 2025 Earnings Report, Fortinet shared that a quarter of its installed base is facing EOS (end of support) by 2026. This is based on earlier generations of chips (mainly SOC3 and NP6). This will impact the customers who purchased firewalls during the 2021-2022 'super cycle' and follow the typical five-year upgrade cycle.
The same is true for other leading firewall vendors. Lately, I've seen a number of discussions from customers online who have reported significant price increases on renewals and expensive forced hardware refreshes. As a result, many enterprise customers are looking to switch vendors due to concerns about total cost of ownership with constant price hikes during refresh cycles.
A firewall refresh provides an excellent opportunity to migrate to a modern framework. Zero trust has surfaced as a way to ensure a robust, adaptive security posture.
Here are some key reasons why zero trust is important to future-proof your security infrastructure:
• Eliminates implicit trust by continuously verifying every user and device, regardless of location.
• Reduces attack surfaces by segmenting the network and controlling access strictly. Firewalls play a critical role in this.
• Prevents data breaches by ensuring only authenticated and authorized users can access sensitive data and applications.
• Simplifies compliance by consistently applying security policies across the enterprise.
• Enhances visibility and control of network traffic and user activities and detects and blocks malicious activities.
A well-planned firewall refresh goes beyond acquiring new equipment; it's about building a more secure, efficient and scalable security infrastructure. It's an opportunity to reassess the appliance sprawl at your sites and consolidate multiple functions—security, SD-WAN and, if need be, a switch into a single device. It is an opportunity to simplify your architecture and reduce costs, not just today but also for the next decade.
Consider extending this consolidation to the LANs, too. Software-driven LAN (SD-LAN) could be an excellent opportunity to combine security, routing, network services and switching to trim costs and improve agility.
Careful planning and comparative analysis of your incumbent firewalls with other firewall solutions can enhance your security to keep up with emerging threats, increase performance to support throughput demands and potentially reduce your total cost of ownership. Consider the following when evaluating enterprise firewalls:
• Security Effectiveness: How effectively the firewall protects and controls network access, applications and users while preventing threats and blocking malicious traffic.
• Threat Prevention: How effective the firewall is in protecting a trusted network from an untrusted network while allowing authorized communications to pass through.
• Rated Throughput: How the firewall performed under various adverse conditions such as maximum connections, transactions per second, concurrency, throughput and latency.
• Price & Value: How cost-effective the firewall is in relation to performance, manageability and security.
• Vendor Lock-In: When software, ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) and hardware are tightly coupled in firewalls, vendor lock-in is inevitable. To mitigate this, consider using open standards, modular architecture and multi-vendor environments.
Instead of relying on vendor-driven refresh cycles, reassess your security and performance needs. Evaluate if a new architecture or vendor can better support zero trust, cloud and SD-WAN priorities cost-effectively.
Leverage the refresh cycle as a strategic inflection point. Consolidate firewall, SD-WAN, SASE/SSE, IoT security and even LAN infrastructure. This will reduce operational complexity, lower total cost of ownership and future-proof your network.
Before committing to any refresh, review third-party evaluations, such as those from CyberRatings.org or Gartner. Use objective data on performance and price/performance ratios to evaluate comparatively, negotiate better terms and choose the best-fit solution for your enterprise.
In conclusion, to align with modern needs, reassess your security and performance requirements, consolidate security functions to simplify operations and reduce costs and demand independent validation and cost transparency before committing to any refresh.
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