The shift in cybercrime from pranks to profits and now profits plus politics means that more than ever, enterprise technology groups need to be vigilant in protecting their applications and services from attack and compromise. The accompanying migration of attack strategies to focus on hitting applications rather than lower layers of the network stack makes protection at the top of the stack crucial: applications are the gateways to enterprise data and the cornerstone of online services.  Taking a cue from intrusion prevention systems and application-level firewalls, next generation firewalls bring application and user awareness to the fore by layering them on top of more traditional firewall functions. In this presentation, John Burke discusses why traditional firewalls are inadequate in today’s threat landscape and explains why next-generation firewalls are more application and identity aware, content sensitive and open to collaboration.