Licensing a cloud firewall
Firewalls deployed in a datacenter typically get booted up and will run for years, but in a cloud setting, a firewall may serve only a very temporary purpose. Resources, like additional web servers, may only be spun up during certain times of the day to handle additional capacity, and then get spun down as the load diminishes. So, too, can cloud firewalls be spun up to provide more capacity and shut down once the need dies down.
Typical licensing is charged on a yearly basis and doesn’t consider how many hours or processing cycles are consumed by the firewall. In cloud environments, the licensing model can be tailored to better suit the actual usage of the firewall.
At the time of writing, there are 2 different flavors available from the marketplace:
- VM-Series Next Generation Firewall: This is the traditional virtual machine firewall. It is completely managed like a hardware firewall and is licensed using Flex credits or “...
