Are firewalls limiting scaling factor to small to medium-sized enterprises in the wake of micro-segmentation?

Media-rich content, moving on-premises infrastructure to the "cloud", and an ever-increasing number of Internet users resulted in Ethernet speeds proliferating. In two decades, we saw Ethernet standardization going from 1Gbps to, most recently, 400 Gbps. Security appliances, such as firewalls, did not keep up with the rate of innovation. Security, as a critical function of any organization, needed to adapt, and it went in the direction of micro-segmentation. Experiments were conducted to determine if presently deployed firewalls at small to medium-sized enterprises still scale adequately given the Ethernet speeds used in enterprise networks. Results indicate that the flow-based firewalls, with enabled features such as Intrusion Detection and Prevention, are optimized for small to medium-sized environments to the point that they do not represent scaling or throughput throttle in environments deployed.