Other techniques might also be employed, such as TLS-encrypted traffic inspection, website filtering, QoS/bandwidth management, antivirus inspection, third-party identity management integration (e.g. LDAP, RADIUS, Active Directory),[1] and SSL decryption[2] One of the first mentions of the NGFW term was in a 2004 document by Gartner.
Kenneth Tam speculated that the term Unified Threat Management (UTM) was coined by IDC because they did not want to adopt the name of their competitor.
[3] NGFWs include the typical functions of traditional firewalls such as packet filtering,[4] network- and port-address translation (NAT), stateful inspection, and virtual private network (VPN) support.
The goal of next-generation firewalls is to include more layers of the OSI model, improving filtering of network traffic that is dependent on the packet contents.
[6] NGFWs use a more thorough inspection style, checking packet payloads and matching signatures for harmful activities such as exploitable attacks and malware.