Firewall Security

In the field of computer security, firewalls are one of the oldest and most effective forms of defence. The principle of blocking access to a network for parties that are unknown, unauthorised or untrusted is clear and simple, but a firewall security service today is a far more sophisticated animal than it was twenty years ago. There are several different types of firewall in common usage, some protecting software, others hardware. A hardware firewall may take the form of a secure router that stands guard at the interface of your network and gateway while a software firewall is a programme within your network that manages port traffic and applications. Technological advances have led to the creation of cloud-based firewalls, which are versatile and scalable.

The most basic type is the packet filtering firewall which can block a specific traffic protocol, IP address or port number. However, this doesn’t protect you from web-based assaults. A more comprehensive solution is provided by a proxy service or gateway model which functions by monitoring and filtering incoming messages from external servers. One step up takes us to stateful multi-layer inspection (SMLI) firewalls which use knowledge of data and packets from previous connections to filter traffic according to port, protocol and state. It also allows rules and context to be set by an administrator. Building on the SMLI, a unified threat management (UTM) firewall adds intrusion and antivirus protection.

A modern firewall security service will be capable of combating the most resourceful cyber criminals with extremely broad functionality. It is able to carry out all the functions we’ve come to expect but with such a diversity of products on the market, it can be very difficult to choose the one that’s right for your organisation. For example, a deep packet inspection firewall is an excellent idea in principle because it examines application layer attacks, but the depth of its analysis may not be sufficient to discover every threat in a specific packet, thus allowing the best hidden attacks to slip through. Similarly, application-aware firewalls can understand and parse protocols according to specific and comprehensive rules and signatures, but their effectiveness depends on the robustness of their parsing capabilities in dealing with the immense variations in traffic.

It is highly unlikely that any business does not already have some form of firewall protection in place since all hardware and software tends to come pre-equipped. But is yours sufficient? Gradeon is highly qualified to advise on the suitability and strengths of different firewall solutions. Our consultancy service takes cyber protection extremely seriously and by conducting a rigorous and thorough firewall security review, we can identify vulnerabilities that still exist in your network. We are experienced in working with next-generation firewall technology which goes far beyond packet filtering and stateful inspection, offering the ability to block advanced malware and all kinds of application-layer attacks. Security may never be 100% guaranteed, but with Gradeon, you can be sure of finding the most effective firewall security for your business which is future-proofed to address constantly evolving threats.