Firewall Solutions
What are firewalls?
A firewall is basically the first line of defence for a network. The basic purpose of a firewall is to keep uninvited guests and unauthorised users from browsing or gaining entry into a network especially corporate ones. These generally are placed at the perimeter of the network to act as the gatekeeper for all incoming/outgoing traffic. In particular a firewall in is designed to protect against a whole host of threats to a network from worms, Trojans, Denial of Service and the always popular and pernicious social engineering.
Firewalls can be composed of a single router, multiple routers, a single host system or multiple hosts running firewall software, hardware appliances specifically designed to provide firewall services, or any combination thereof. They vary greatly in design, functionality, architecture, and cost. Therefore, to successfully implement a firewall solution in an organisation, it is important to understand what each firewall solution can or cannot do. Firewall solutions can have both positive and negative effects on a network.
How do firewalls function?
A firewall allows you to tightly control access by establishing certain rules to determine what traffic should be allowed in or out of your private network. Depending on the type of firewall implemented you could restrict access to only certain IP addresses or domain names, or you can block certain types of traffic by blocking the TCP/IP ports they use or watch for specific words/keywords. It can also be used to control data flowing out of a network as well data coming into a network.
There are basically four mechanisms used by firewalls to restrict traffic. One device or application may use more than one of these in conjunction with each other to provide more in-depth protection. The four mechanisms are packet-filtering, circuit-level gateway, proxy server and application gateway.
When used effectively, firewalls can also be used for access control i.e. user authentication, auditing, logging and security management.
Effective Firewall Planning
The success of any firewall solution's implementation is directly related to the existence of a well-thought-out and consistently-implemented security policy. Without a security policy, there are no requirements to use as a guideline on which to base a selection decision. A security policy states, at a high level, what security measures an organization wants to put into practice. These security measures are developed independently from any technical solution that will be used to enforce them. By keeping the security policy and technical solution separate, the policy will not be limited by the capabilities of the hardware or software or any specific firewall solution. The choice of the technology used in the firewall solution should reflect the security policy not the other way around.
Having a firewall as a gatekeeper in the first place is definitely a wise idea. However, no one security solution will solve everything. The more lines of defence you have in place, the harder it is for hackers to get in and the safer will be an organisations network.
Whether you need a firewall setup in a small office to a multi-site setup, we have a solution to meet your needs.