Why is Firewall Security Important to Companies?

Protecting your business’s assets and data is most crucial, which is why you need a solid firewall. However, firewalls are frequently misunderstood as being only necessary for large corporations or financial institutions. In reality, regardless of the size of the company, every business with a network should have a firewall.

For a wide variety of services, almost every business is connected to the Internet. Email, search, social media, cloud storage are among them.

A question arises here: what exactly is a Firewall and how does it works?

What is Firewall?

A firewall is a network security system that measures incoming and outgoing network traffic and determines whether to allow or block specific traffic based on a set of security rules.

While antivirus software protects the file system from malicious programs, a firewall prevents attackers or external threats from gaining access to your system in the first place.

How does a firewall works?

The first line of defense in cybersecurity is a firewall, which can be a software or hardware or a combination of both. The purpose of firewall is to keep unauthorized connections and malicious software out of your network. It monitors incoming and outgoing traffic, and if a computer or a program from outside your network attempts to gain access, the firewall decides what to block or allow based on cybersecurity rules.

Let us now go over the reasons, why firewall security is important for business.

• Prevention of Cyber Security Attacks: The primary reason for using a firewall is undoubtedly cyber security. Firewalls can prevent malicious software from being installed on a user’s computers. However, they can used as a part of multi-layered cyber security strategy to guard against distributed denial of service attacks, in which a hacker floods your network with unwanted traffic.

• Detection of Threat: A managed service provider will configure your firewall to send an alert if somethings appears to be wrong with your network. We can, for example, include features that will scan incoming network traffic for sensitive data. As a result, we can bring into action and begin securing data and mitigating the effects of a potential data breach.

• Blocking Unapproved Websites: A firewall can prevent the users from accessing specific external websites in addition to preventing unauthorized external users from accessing your network. For instance, you could implement a policy that restricts network access to social media sites.

• Bandwidth Measurement: A firewall can do more than just protect your devices. It can also be used to monitor and limit the network bandwidth that flows through it. For instance, you can restrict network bandwidth for non-business videos, music, and images, reserving bandwidth for higher priority business traffic.

• Provide VPN Services: Site-to-site connectivity is provided by many firewalls via Virtual Private Network (VPN) services. Mobile device users and users at remote sites can securely access your internal network resources using this VPN functionality. This improves productivity, collaboration, and information sharing.

While firewall protection has many advantages, these features are only useful if they are properly installed and managed.

Source: https://www.htshosting.org/knowledge-base/website-security/185/why-is-firewall-security-important-to-companies