In order to properly service and upkeep firewalls, your team needs to have at least a baseline knowledge of how firewalls operate. It’s especially important to understand what a firewall can and can’t do. For instance, next-generation firewall solutions are built to perform deep packet inspection, meaning they look into individual pieces of information that enter and exit your system – a “gatekeeper” for your systems, per se. They perform this function well, but only when they can actually see the data in the payload. This is becoming more and more difficult in the age of “encrypt-everything”.