Understanding the zone-based firewall
Traditionally, when considering a firewall as an element of your network, most likely you will imagine a network design like the one in Figure 1.1, with two to four areas surrounding a box. Most of the time, whatever is placed in the north is considered dangerous, the east and west are somewhat gray areas, and the south is the happy place where users do their daily tasks. The box in the middle is the firewall:
Figure 1.1: Basic network topology
In reality, a network design may look a lot more complex due to network segmentation, remote offices being connected to headquarters via all sorts of different technologies, and the adoption of cloud vendors.
In a route-based firewall, zones are simply an architectural or topological concept that helps identify which areas comprise the global network that is used by the company and are usually represented by tags that can be attached to a subnet object.
They hold no bearing in any...
