A cybersecurity strategy is incomplete without a firewall. Even though you are a micro business with a simple website, you are not immune to cyberattacks. Most small businesses and even mid-size businesses think that hackers won’t target them because they are not big or have nothing sensitive in their databases.
Unfortunately, hackers target small and medium businesses more than large businesses because of the lack of cybersecurity measures. The tendency to overlook the cybersecurity aspect of small businesses makes them more vulnerable to cyber threats and cybercrime than ever. As a result, a firewall is a must to implement as a cybersecurity measure.
Though several brands offer firewalls, not all of them are created equal. If you are planning to buy firewalls to protect your business network, make sure your firewall has the following features:
- Freedom of determining which applications can be accessed
When your employees have access to the Internet, it can be challenging to control which applications they use and which they should not. The easiest to control their usage of applications is a firewall.
A firewall allows you to permit access to applications that increase productivity and block the ones that lead to time wastage or could be a threat to the safety of your data, system, or network.
With a firewall, you don’t have to check every system physically or write a custom script to check applications automatically. You can simply create a policy with your firewall to allow or block applications, depending on their necessity.
- Allow you to provide more bandwidth to high-priority applications
Depending on what applications are currently being used, your firewall can manage the bandwidth accordingly. For instance, if an employee is surfing the Internet for research purposes and a manager is attending a live meeting, the bandwidth priority will be given to the live meeting application.
This priority is determined based on whose work will be influenced the most. For instance, there is no big deal if a data packet is lost or arrives late when surfing the Internet or reading an email.
However, loss of packets during a live meeting can lead to breakage in voice, misunderstanding, and bad impression on the clients.
- Cut access to peer-to-peer applications
A peer-to-peer application is the type of application that allows individual computer systems i.e. peers to connect over the Internet to share files without the use of servers. Most P2P applications are unproductive and allow people to download unlicensed and copyrighted media.
Besides, they consume your data and bandwidth quickly and can also transmit malware to your system. It can be challenging to block all P2P applications manually because new changes are made to such applications every day.
Advanced firewall software is constantly updated about new P2P applications and blocks access to these applications.
- Control access to social media and other unproductive platforms
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Telegram are all used by employees. Most often, open access to these platforms causes your employees to become unproductive. With a firewall, you can block access to these social media platforms.
However, in some cases, blocking access to social media for everyone can be counterproductive. For instance, your marketing personnel might need these platforms to update news about your company.
A firewall can still help you block certain features, such as Facebook Games that reduce productivity or increase the risk of cyberattacks. You can even allow chat but block the transfer of files.
- Get a visual representation of what’s going on in your business network
If you also wonder what happens on your network, who is wasting more bandwidth, or what is causing your network to be slow, a firewall can help you find the answer to these questions.
With a firewall, you can get real-time visualization of incoming and outgoing application traffic and user activity, and detect non-compliant network usage.
- Control and manage bandwidth for specific users
An advanced firewall allows you to create and apply policies for different groups of users. So, it is not necessary that a policy is forced on everyone. For instance, if your CEO complains that he/she cannot watch YouTube videos of certain events properly and the video is not clear, it might happen if you have created a limit to the bandwidth usage for streaming videos for all users.
With a next-generation firewall, you can ease off bandwidth restrictions for your CEO or a certain group of users.
- Protect your business against ransomware attacks and breaches
One of the most important tasks a firewall performs is to block cyber attacks such as ransomware, spyware, and breaches that are made possible with malware and intrusion attempts. A high-quality firewall is designed to block millions of known or unknown attacks from entering your business network.
- Identify botnet activity and connections by country
An advanced firewall can identify if a connection to an IP in a foreign country is just a benign connection from somebody browsing on the web or if it is a botnet activity. With GeoIP country traffic identification, you can control network traffic coming from or going to certain countries.
- Perform email and web filtering to reduce data leaks
In some companies, outbound emails don’t pass through the security system or verification of the contents of the email attachments is not carried out. In both cases, company confidential attachments can easily leak. However, you can prevent this through a firewall. The same goes for webmail services such as Yahoo, Gmail, etc.
- Bandwidth management for audio and video streaming
Access to video and audio streaming platforms, such as YouTube and Spotify, is sometimes useful but most misused. While you can block access to these platforms, a better approach is to limit the usage of bandwidth for streaming audio and video. The goal is to identify the network traffic by what it is instead of where it is coming from.
Author: TechBlonHub
As a passionate blogger, I'm thrilled to share my expertise, insights, and enthusiasm with you. I believe that technical knowledge should be shared, not hoarded. That's why I take the time to craft detailed, well-researched content that's easy to follow, even for non-tech. I love hearing from you, answering your questions, and learning from your experiences. Your feedback helps me create content that's tailored to your needs and interests