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Oct 14, 2025

From Perimeter to Mesh: Hillstone’s Perspective on HMF Implementation

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The evolution of cybersecurity technology never ceases. When Gartner adjusted the traditional Network Firewall Magic Quadrant to the Hybrid Mesh Firewall (HMF) quadrant in 2024, this was not merely an update to evaluation criteria, but marked the entire cybersecurity industry’s entry into a new technological era.

This transformation reflects the deep-seated needs of enterprise digital transformation: from single-point perimeter defense to distributed collaborative defense, from static deployment to dynamic adaptation, from isolated operation to intelligent interconnection. As a veteran in the cybersecurity field, Hillstone Networks has long recognized this technological trend and made forward-looking investments in the HMF direction. We believe this evolution of industry standards provides a broader stage for all security vendors committed to technological innovation.

What is Hybrid Mesh Firewall (HMF)? — Beyond Traditional Boundaries

Traditional firewalls are built upon the concept of “perimeter,” with security protection between data centers and external networks as the core. However, driven by cloud computing, multi-cloud architectures, and distributed work environments, enterprise network boundaries have gradually blurred, requiring security protection to break through existing frameworks. If traditional firewalls are “gate guards,” then HMF represents a “distributed collaborative defense system.”

HMF was proposed precisely in this context. Its core characteristics include:

Unified Management: HMF achieves unified policy distribution, monitoring, and operations for firewall devices distributed across different locations and in different forms through centralized management platforms, completely breaking the siloed approach of traditional firewalls.

Collaborative Interconnection: Each node in the mesh is no longer an independent defense island, but an intelligent component capable of sharing threat intelligence and coordinating responses to security incidents. When one node detects a threat, the entire mesh can respond rapidly.

Hybrid Deployment: HMF supports hybrid deployment across physical devices, virtualization platforms, and cloud-native environments, providing consistent security protection experiences regardless of enterprise network architecture complexity.

Agile Elasticity: Facing rapid changes in business requirements and dynamic evolution of threat landscapes, HMF can quickly scale up or down and flexibly adjust protection strategies, truly achieving “security follows business wherever it goes.”

What Real Problems Can HMF Solve? — Customer Value and Scenarios

In the process of enterprise digital transformation, multi-cloud and hybrid architectures have become the norm. Correspondingly, security construction faces new challenges:

Multi-Cloud Unified Strategy: Enterprises often simultaneously use multiple public and private cloud platforms, making it difficult for traditional security devices to achieve unified cross-cloud management. HMF enables enterprises to enjoy consistent security experiences across different cloud platforms through centralized policy distribution.

Hybrid Network Management: With the proliferation of remote work and mobile offices, enterprise network boundaries have become increasingly blurred. Employees may work from home, at branch offices, or access applications in the cloud. HMF provides unified visibility of network-wide traffic, enabling security administrators to clearly understand the security status of every connection.

Elastic Scaling: During business peak periods, traffic surges can make traditional firewalls bottlenecks. HMF’s mesh deployment can flexibly add nodes based on demand, easily handling traffic spikes.

Hillstone’s HMF Solution — Ready and Empowering the Future

Hillstone Networks’ HMF solution is not simply a response to trends, but the result of years of technological accumulation. We have built a complete HMF ecosystem across three dimensions:

Unified Command Center: Intelligent Management Platform

Hillstone Security Management (HSM) platform not only achieves unified visibility and centralized operations for security policies, logs, and events, but also provides rich integration capabilities, truly becoming the unified command center for enterprise security and networking. HSM supports unified management of various security devices including firewalls, ADC (Application Delivery Controllers), and WAF (Web Application Firewalls), enabling users to maintain policy consistency and management convenience even in complex multi-device environments. This cross-product-line management capability significantly reduces the complexity of enterprise security operations. HSM also integrates application-aware SD-WAN capabilities, intelligently identifying business application types and dynamically selecting optimal paths based on application importance and network conditions, significantly enhancing business experience and network reliability while ensuring security. This deep integration of “security + networking” makes HMF not just a security protection mesh, but a business assurance mesh.

Powerful Mesh Nodes: Complete Product Portfolio

Hillstone’s complete firewall product line ranges from data center-grade high-performance devices to lightweight branch office equipment, from physical appliances to virtualization solutions to cloud-native containerized components, comprehensively covering various HMF deployment scenarios. At the technical architecture level, Hillstone firewalls employ a fully parallel security operating system, achieving an efficient “single unpack, parallel processing” model that enables multiple security inspections to occur simultaneously, significantly improving processing efficiency and delivering high-performance security protection experiences. Meanwhile, the complete separation of data plane and control plane ensures that management operations do not affect data forwarding even under high loads, significantly enhancing system reliability. Hillstone’s self-developed ASIC chips provide hardware firewalls with ultra-low latency within 4.8us, 200% throughput performance improvement, 150% improvement in new connections per second, and 100% IPSec VPN performance enhancement, providing a robust performance foundation for the HMF mesh and ensuring stable and reliable protection capabilities even in large-scale deployment scenarios.

Collaborative Security Brain: Threat Intelligence and Services

Through deep integration of threat intelligence, security services, and AI technology, Hillstone has built an intelligent defense system with collaborative response capabilities. Hillstone’s accumulated threat intelligence network provides real-time threat data support for each node in the HMF mesh. When new threats are detected, intelligence can be synchronized across the entire mesh, achieving a “detect at one point, defend across the network” collaborative effect. This intelligence-driven defense mechanism significantly shortens the time window from threat discovery to network-wide protection. Hillstone’s AI Operations Assistant infuses this security brain with intelligent capabilities. It not only performs intelligent Q&A, security policy optimization, configuration assistance and troubleshooting, but also conducts deep threat analysis and response, anomaly behavior detection, and system optimization recommendations based on threat intelligence. The AI assistant transforms complex security operations work into simple conversational interactions, enabling security teams to respond to threats more rapidly and manage the entire HMF mesh more efficiently.

Continuous Evolution, Creating the Future Together

Hillstone’s HMF solution is built with core requirements such as ensuring stable business operations, secure data, and meeting compliance requirements as its foundation.

Ensuring Business Continuity: Through SD-WAN’s intelligent routing and HMF’s elastic scaling capabilities, critical business operations remain uninterrupted even when facing network fluctuations or traffic surges.

Reducing Security Risks: The collaborative threat intelligence network and mesh-wide rapid response mechanism enable enterprises to contain threats before they spread, significantly reducing the impact scope of security incidents.

Simplifying Operations Management: The unified management platform and AI operations assistant make complex multi-cloud and hybrid network environments manageable and controllable, significantly reducing the operational burden on security teams.

Supporting Compliance Requirements: Centralized policy management and complete audit logs help enterprises more easily meet various compliance standard requirements.

Hillstone’s HMF solution can truly help customers confidently address security challenges brought by digital transformation, complexity management of multi-cloud architectures, performance demands from rapid business growth, and increasingly stringent compliance pressures. We will continue to increase technology investment in the HMF field, continuously improve product capabilities, and work together with customers and partners to build a more secure, intelligent, and efficient cybersecurity protection system.