A firewall acts as a first line of defence between your company’s data and the attackers who are looking for unauthorised access to your data with malicious intent. An intruder can peek into your systems, corrupt, or delete the files in the system, look and misuse the personal information of your employees and can even read your emails. This is where a firewall comes into action. Firewalls can detect the incoming threats and notify all the stakeholders and can even take proactive actions to avoid the threat before it can do any damage to your resources and data. Not only incoming, but a firewall also monitors the outgoing traffic as well. It allows only authorised packets to pass through the internal network of your company.
A firewall can come in two forms – it can either be a piece of hardware that can be fitted into your systems, or it can simply be a software program that can be installed on your systems. A hardware firewall is installed on the walls of your network and act as a barrier to the incoming and the outgoing traffic. On the other hand, a software firewall can be installed on each of your systems individually. You can decide on either of these or can even choose to use a combination of both, depending upon your needs.
Below are the type of firewalls and how they protect your network:
Packet filtering firewall : As is clear from the name, this type of firewall checks the packets passing through the network and filters it based on known parameters and some rules which can be configured by the admin controls.
State-full firewall: A state-full firewall is a network-based firewall that individually tracks sessions of network connections. It examines and evaluates the incoming and outgoing traffic over a period.
Web application firewall: Also known as WAF popularly, this type of firewall works with systems or servers that host webpages over the internet and works to prevent attacks by applying rules for safe HTTP communication.
Next generation firewall: This type of firewall scans the data packets from applications and can prevent malware and spyware to enter the system. This cannot be done by the traditional firewalls.
Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to the attackers, and they are increasingly popular amongst the hacker community. For such business owners, using firewalls makes sense for several reasons:
First, firewalls make sure that you as a business owner are also in control of who has access to your network at any given point of time. You can block potential threats and can specifically block certain IP addresses which fall in the untrusted list.
Firewalls can also save money for small business by preventing attacks by hackers. Even if the attacker finds a way to go beyond the firewall, the software can identify it and remove any damage that can be done.
Firewalls also come into play when you want to restrict your employees from accessing websites that may pose as potential security threats, for example, they might lead to the user download any file which may contain malware.
Firewalls can also be used to limit the network bandwidth available for certain types of data. This can be done by limiting the bandwidth available for streaming the video content over the internet.
You can also use a firewall to provide VPN services. A VPN uses encryption to connect and communicate between two parties. The encrypted traffic then travels across public networks securely. You can configure your firewall to allow only specific computers to have access to the public network, or the internet. You can then create a tunnel that allows this group if computers to communicate with each other over the internet.
In conclusion, firewalls are essential for your business if you want to protect your official documents as well as the personal data of your employees from outside attackers and hackers. A firewall is a basic layer of protection you need to install between the internal network of your organization and the outside world. Therefore, it is suggested to invest in a good firewall now, if you haven’t done it already. For more information visit our site buyfirewallutm.com
