What is a firewall? Well, you have a door and windows on your house and maybe even a few gates on your property, probably all equipped with locks. These locks are used to keep specific entities inside or outside of your home. For example: your dog may run away if you left the back door open or maybe you want to keep your doors and windows locked from the inside to prevent unwanted intruders. Why wouldn’t you want to do the same to your network? Protecting the good things and keeping the bad things out is the primary job of a Firewall, much like doors on your house.
Like a door, a firewall is a device used on your network that can monitor and permit or deny traffic in and out of your network. The rules for permit or deny are defined by the people that configure or manage networks and those monitoring tasks are often watched by the same people.
Firewalls are frequently used in networking to define the edge of your network. This is the point where the internet is fed into your home or business, whether it’s a cable modem, fiber, DSL, satellite, or any form of connection you can come up with. The firewall should be the first thing that line connects too. This will often be seen as a gateway to the world from devices on your network and keeps your computers and devices safe.
More advanced firewalls provide enhanced features for greater network safety. Those features include packet-inspection, content filtering and VPN access. Packet-inspection is determining if each piece of data has been tampered with before making its way to your device, preventing manipulated data into your network. Content filtering blocks predetermined websites for your end users. For example: social media sites could be blocked on the office network to help prevent your employees from clicking on malicious or potentially dangerous ads. VPN access is designed to allow users a safe encrypted method for accessing internal devices. Some firewalls can even include gateway anti-virus and intrusion prevention systems to detect threats in real time and stop them from occurring.
NCS is partnered with SonicWall to provide our customers with the most state of the art Firewall technology. SonicWall is packed with features to make any network a safe environment. Together we can build a network suitable for your business and take the worry away allowing you to rest easy knowing that your network infrastructure is protected from outside threats.
Call our office at 888-776-9088 or email sales@ncs-online.com to request a firewall quote.
