What Is a Firewall and Why Do You Need It?

What is a firewall and why do you need it? Here at Cadamier Network Security, we realize that most people have heard of a firewall, but far too many people are not aware of the details of how firewalls work and how one might improve security for you or your business. Firewalls can be an important part of your network’s security and can also provide some additional benefits.

What is a Firewall?

A firewall intrusion products filter information coming in from the internet into a network or computer. Firewalls are frequently set up with filters that stop certain types of traffic. For example, firewall filters can help stop hackers from gaining entry to your network. Firewalls also prevent your employees from accessing sites they should not access while using a work computer. In a work environment, this can help curb some of the unproductive web searching habits of employees.

How Does a Firewall Work?

Firewalls control network traffic. The firewall can filter the flow of traffic to and from the network or computer. Firewalls can be customized to fill the specific needs of your business, and firewalls can work in different ways to achieve the filtering and protection such as packet filtering, stateful inspection, and proxy service.

Packet Filtering, Stateful Inspection, and Proxy Service

One way that firewalls can process information is in small packets. Packets, which are able to make it through the filters are allowed through while packets that do not make it through the filters are discarded. Stateful inspection is similar to packet filtering but it compares portions of the packet to already verified database information to determine if it is verified and trusted.

Proxy service acts as a gateway between networks, it can both be used to help improve security and to monitor traffic. Proxy services sometimes use caches of previously visited sites to improve traffic response time. Proxy service can also create mirrored sites to protect the location of information. Additionally, customizing firewalls can allow for adding or removing filters based on domain names, ports, IP address, or even words or phrases.

Why Use Firewalls

Firewalls alone may not solve all your security issues but firewalls can help with a myriad of security problems such as SMTP hijacking, spam, macros, redirect bombs, email bombs, viruses, backdoors, and remote logins. Firewalls and comprehensive security management can be customized to dramatically reduce your security risks and threats to your business. Firewalls can also help stop your employees from misusing their computers in the workplace.

Adding firewalls to your security is great but may require some time to adjust the customizations correctly for your company’s needs. It should also be just one part of your network security. If you want to improve your network security or if you need a current system to work better for your unique specifications, contact Cadamier Network Security in Denver. We can help you get the maximum network security and best designed WAN infrastructure you need.