Founded on a simple idea: firewalls that don't talk to each other are firewalls that lose.

One server, one question

A client needed their server secured. We ran the usual playbook — hardening, monitoring, blocklists of known-bad IPs. Then came the question that mattered: what about the IPs we personally know are bad, the ones caught trying to break in, but that nobody else has flagged yet? That was the seed of private, first-hand threat intelligence.

We were running multiple servers at the time, each logging attacks in isolation — a security guard who never talks to the guard next door. The obvious next question followed: what if they shared what they knew? What if the whole network acted as one? Coordinating threat data across machines, pooling knowledge, making the network smarter than any single node — that idea became the company.

The idea was to bring the Security Operations Centres of separate, independent organisations into a single alliance, sharing what each was seeing in real time. A single vendor's firewall — no matter how well engineered — only ever sees its own customers. It took a genuine alliance of heterogeneous SOCs, each watching a different slice of the internet, to see the whole picture. That's the gap OneFirewall was built to close.

From "Firewall Trust Alliance" to OneFirewall

The working name was FTA — Firewall Trust Alliance. Solid concept, forgettable name. In one of the late meetings where the concept was being argued over again, someone put it simply: "it's like they're all one firewall." The name stuck, the concept grew into a company, and OneFirewall Alliance was incorporated in England.

What followed was a longer argument, inside the company, about identity: was this simply a CTI vendor competing against much larger marketing budgets? The answer that stuck was that intelligence sitting unused in a report protects nothing. What matters is whether it's actionable — not "here's a list of bad IPs, good luck," but a firewall that has already blocked them, automatically, in real time.