I wanted to share an analogy I wrote that was part of a response to a document effectively describing the cloning of a production AD environment that would live on the same physical network without a firewall.
Visualize you have a locked and secured gun cabinet with loaded shotguns with hair triggers. But instead of a cabinet you really have a corner of the room with some masking tape drawing lines on the floor around the guns of where the cabinet would be if it actually existed. Visualize your cute but perhaps mentally challenged 5 year old quadruplets playing in that room. Can you visualize anything bad happening as a result of having the tape on the floor instead of the actual cabinet even after you have explained in detail to the 5 year olds that the tape means stay away? A firewall can’t even be considered a cabinet; it is a 3 foot baby gate that can be bypassed by the 5 year olds given enough unattended time. A cabinet would be disconnected networks.
