Speaking at the Check Point Experience customer/dealer event in London this week, Reish said that today's firewalls are all about users and access control from an IT management perspective.
"Controlling the internet application is a great challenge. Today you have to control new services such as Facebook and Twitter, which have now moved beyond their consumer origins and are increasingly used for business purposes", he said.
Twitter, he explained, might be being used for marketing purposes, whilst YouTube might be being used for competitor analysis, and LinkedIn might be being used by a company's HR department for candidates for jobs that have become vacant.
"The problem with these services is that you cannot lock them all down. Facebook, for example, has become very business oriented, and Twitter is also being used as a microblogging service by a growing number of businesses" he explained.
"The problem for the IT department is that, useful though these services are, they can consume a lot of bandwidth, and so reduce the available bandwidth for more company critical applications", he said.
"And then there is the issue of productivity being lost by members of staff using the services instead of working. And you can't control all employees all of the time", he added.
The nett result of these changes in internet behaviour, says Reish, is that companies now need a firewall platform that not only defends an organisation against external threats, it also needs to manage privileges on the company network for users.
"We will be introducing new firewall technologies to meet this challenge later this year, centering on the ability to provide strong granularity and control across all software blades", he said.
So where is Check Point heading with its 2010 firewall security strategy?
"We are trying to take a holistic view on security and allows security managers to create their own customised policies for divisions of their operation", he said.
"So let's extend this idea to the firewall software blade environment. You can block specific applications such as YouTube, as well as putting other user controls in place", he added.
According to Reish, this level of granularity at the firewall level means that you can control specific applications for specific groups of user - or even individual users, if required.
You can even, he told his audience, extend the granularity to different software blades, meaning that each user can have different account privileges on each software blade.
He added that, as users' internet usage profiles develop, so the firewall can adapt to their changes in online behaviour.