Natasha David, senior analyst for security software at IDC, said that she'd heard comments from CIOs that they were looking at implementing firewalls at different levels, such as on desktops as well as servers and at the gateway.
However, David added that she didn't believe a great number were doing it in practice at the moment because of the current economic climate.
She also warned that firewalls weren't going to solve all business security problems. David said that she'd heard anecdotally that companies were now realising that they're most vulnerable to the employee who is the exception rather than the rule, such as senior managers working remotely.
Recent reports have also found that although firewall logs can provide valuable information to enterprises, IT departments can also find them difficult to monitor and manage consistently.
Leigh Costin, group product manager at vendor Symantec, said that it was seeing businesses looking for more flexible administration, because of the need to be able to manage the various firewalls in the organisation which could be using different policies.
"What we see is that as soon as you see any kind of proliferation one of the top five questions is management," Costin said.
"At the end of the day you can log everything, but then what do you do with the logs?," he said. "You need to have someone able to manage that even if it's a question of just backing it up."
Costin used the example of the growth of businesses using firewall appliances, which had a defined disk space and could be remotely managed. This meant that logging, alerting, and reporting and configurations all had to be centralised and backed up.
He said this was part of the planning and policy development the IT department had to carry out.
Firewalls can be described as a crustacean defence, according to Grant Slender, principal consultant for Australasia at security vendor Internet Security Systems. Slender said that a lot of organisations now use other tools, such as vulnerability detection tools, as well.
Slender has also seen increased interest in putting firewalls into other devices, rather than just building them onto the outside of the network.
Likewise, he has seen customers looking at how effectively firewall products are being managed, for example when they are being used at the desktop. In addition, businesses are also looking at more dynamic rules, to provide flexibility to automatically determine what is and isn't appropriate, Slender said.
