Why should you invest in desktop firewall? The answer is quite simple: to save money and protect your company. When end-user systems in a corporate network are not locked down, your security is compromised and can be threatened by dangerous things, like viruses. Besides losing substantial amounts of money in productivity losses, you may also suffer the loss of something more valuable: your most confidential business data and files. Let us use the example of viruses to see just how much a firewall can save your company.

A computer virus is a small program that copies itself to other computers and spreads rapidly from one system to the next and is very hard to get rid of. Viruses come in many different shapes and forms: email messages or hoaxes, worms, and even what seem to be harmless files. They vary in their degree of destructiveness, as well, from extremely lethal (damaging your hard drive and crashing your computer) to just annoying (presenting messages on your screen that can eventually cause your computer to crash).

Viruses act fast. A virus in an email message can infect the computers of an entire corporation in just a few minutes, costing the business millions of dollars annually in productivity loss and cleanup. According to TrendMicro, 85% of viruses come from emails, and if your company’s email is attacked, your business will suffer until the email system is working again.

• In 2004, the Mydoom worm infected almost 250,000 computers in one day!
• In 1999, the Melissa virus plagued so many companies that it forced companies to turn off their email systems, even Microsoft was forced to do this!
• Stopping the virus at the server level, before it reaches computers and files, can save your company thousands of dollars. TrendMicro predicts that firewall can save you $22,000 per incident, or $528,000 per year, just in email virus protection!

You may think your company is small enough that it doesn’t need to worry about having firewall protection. That’s not the case! If your business uses an internet connection, you need firewall. Your company is at risk every time it connects to the internet without firewall because attackers can get access to your confidential data and files. Attacks occur randomly and aren”t restricted to big companies. Here we’ve outlined the damage a single virus could cost your business, but this is just one example of the many dangerous menaces threatening the security of your data. Desktop firewall can protect your company from these viruses and other threats, like zero day attacks and others.

Want to know how much a virus or similar threat could cost your company specifically? Contact CopiaTECH and we will help outline for you the degree to which your security is at risk. Together, we can come up with a corporate policy designed to meet your company’s security needs and keep your business safe and protected.