Firewalls
Why does the small and medium business (SMB) need Firewall?
Firewalls are you’re the electric fence that keeps people out of your hackers out of your business computer house! With the multitude of attacks that are always seeking to grab new computer resources for zombie processes, spam servers, etc. firewalls are a necessary part of the business security solution.
Firewalls allow you to have improved control over the traffic that flows in and out of your network. On the information highway, you need a good stop sign on your network to prevent bad traffic from wreaking havoc on your systems.
Desktop firewalls allow you to take the protection a step further down to the user system. These are very important tools to have, especially on critical data systems like accounting.
What is a Firewall?
From wikipeida.com:
A firewall’s basic task is to control traffic between computer networks with different zones of trust. Typical examples are the Internet which is a zone with no trust and an internal network which is (and should be) a zone with high trust.
The ultimate goal is to provide controlled interfaces between zones of differing trust levels through the enforcement of a security policy and connectivity model. A zone with an intermediate trust level, situated between the Internet and a trusted internal network, is often referred to as a “perimeter network” or Demilitarized zone (DMZ).
A firewall’s function is analogous to firewalls in building construction.
Proper configuration of firewalls demands skill from the firewall administrator. It requires considerable understanding of network protocols and of computer security. Small mistakes can render a firewall worthless as a security tool. Standard Security practices dictate a “default-deny” firewall ruleset.
Packet filters act by inspecting the “packets” which represent the basic unit of data transfer between computers on the Internet. If a packet matches the packet filter’s set of rules, the packet filter will drop (silently discard) the packet, or reject it (discard it, and send “error responses” to the source).
Stateful firewall maintains records of all connections passing through the firewall, and is able to determine whether a packet is the start of a new connection, or part of an existing connection. Though there’s still a set of static rules in such a firewall, the state of a connection can in itself be one of the criteria which trigger specific rules.
An application layer firewall is that it can “understand” certain applications and protocols (such as File Transfer Protocol, DNS or web browsing), and can detect whether an unwanted protocol is being sneaked through on a non-standard port, or whether a protocol is being abused in a known harmful way. This type of filtering can be carried out by proxy servers, but if the filtering is done by a standalone firewall appliance, or in a device for traffic shaping, the technology is likely to be referred to as deep packet inspection.
Contact CopiaTECH to see how we can help you today with Firewall products.