Network Security & Firewall Management On Long Island
Businesses have been emerging in every possible aspect. Be it any sized business, there are some priority factors. These factors mainly consist of marketing, customer satisfaction, delivering quality products, and providing decent quality to approach the consumer demand. While all of these aspects hold importance, IT has also become an essential part of the business. Many businesses struggle with managing their IT operations.
However, managing and maintaining an IT team is becoming more accessible, thanks to the technology and the services provided by IT companies. Now, if you have a small or large business, you should implement a few IT operations or services per se to scale your business. Let us get into all the IT services and processes you should integrate with your business without further ado!
Which IT Service Should You Integrate with a Business?
A business's primary goal for integrating IT services is to provide its services to the consumer and the business teams. Collaboration and ease of functionality are often considered. To be precise, a business may collaborate their services and provide a way to access those services easily.
Now, we have all witnessed the rise of employees accessing the resources of a business or an organization virtually. Since many users would access the resources or software, it is necessary to ensure the security parameters. Security is achieved by deploying firewalls on a given network. In a nutshell, any business whose resources or services are accessed remotely should pay close attention to the firewall, liable for a system's security and safety.
What Is a Firewall?
A firewall is a network protection apparatus that manages a particular system's incoming and outgoing traffic. It is used to implement security protocols over the existing security policies on a resource.
Technically, a firewall integrates traffic into a device's entry point, i.e., ports. These ports are addresses of machines where information is exchanged and retrieved. The ports or addresses are allowed to interact with a predetermined set of ports.
Consider this example; address 1.2.3.4 can exchange information with 1.3.4.5 on port number 3. A firewall will provide security to your system by filtering the traffic from your internal network to the public network. It will reduce the chances of malware or data breach attacks.
Why Is a Next-gen Firewall Necessary for a Business?
Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) are becoming a part of the growth and evolution with evolution. Traditional firewalls allow us to inspect the traffic on a system. While it may be helpful, only an inspection of the traffic might not be enough given the considerable traffic interaction on a system nowadays.
NGFW takes it further. It allows us to inspect deeply, control, and manage the firewall network traffic. It also allows preventing intrusions like malware, viruses, spam, etc. NGFW offers more functionalities than a traditional firewall.
Additional features can enhance network security and protect the system from any disruption. NGFW is easier to maintain and more convenient than traditional firewalls. When compared, NGFW provides complete application visibility and control. It would be the optimal solution to add NGFW to a business's essentials.
Benefits of NGFW over Traditional Firewall:
- Deep packet inspection of the traffic
- Controllable irrespective of ports and address
- Integrated intrusion prevention/protection system
- Integrated Cloud
- Threat intelligence reports
- Traffic identification
- Application awareness
- Works on layer 2 to 7(traditional firewalls works up to 4)
- Easy to install and manage
- The decryption of SSL traffic in both directions
- The enhanced functionality of Network Address Translation(NAT), Port Address Translation (PAT), and Virtual Private Network (VPN)
Benefits of NGFW for a Business
As NGFW provides a better set of features in both security and maintenance, you can expect your business expansion to flow smoothly with it. If there are more secure protocols in your systems, you will avoid malware or viruses. Now, it would help a system from preventing downtime or crashing.
If the system crashes less, the interaction of the traffic increases, and hence, the reach of your business increases as well. Let us look at the advantages you can expect to achieve with NGFW.
1. Intrusion Detection and Prevention system:
The system of features to detect and protect resources from any obstacle is the most favorable ability of NGFW. NGFW analyses the traffic and detects threats in advance. Intrusion detection monitors the traffic continuously to check if there is any violation or suspicious activity and the intrusion prevention program controls the flow of the traffic.
It may be difficult to involve a detection and prevention system altogether in a traditional firewall.
2. Malware Protection
NGFW frequently provides updates to keep up with the emerging security protocols. It ensures that your system and resources are always protected from malicious attacks. These updates are downloaded and installed automatically so that your IT team can focus on other tasks.
The updates are generally security patches to the existing system. After installation, the security protocols get updated and the chances of malware coming through decrease by a good margin.
3. Integrated Software
Traditional firewalls rely on multiple resources to prevent malware and viruses. NGFW, on the other hand, allows an organization to derive a single and streamlined approach to these data breach attacks. It provides all the tools and resources to prevent and protect under one firewall.
Accessing these tools within one resource gives the administration team ease of access, convenient tracking, and assurance that every resource is getting equal distribution for usage.
4. Enhanced Network Speed
With NGFW, you can experience better network speed since a single console is used for all operations. The need to rely on multiple resources and provide network speeds for all can be challenging with old firewalls. NGFW overcomes this by maintaining a consistent input by providing excellent network speeds.
Not only does it provide a significant bump over network speed, but saves a lot of time and energy. With NGFW, maintenance charges are considerably low when compared with a traditional firewall.
Why Should You Consult LI Tech Advisors?
There are a bunch of alternatives to select from. But, if you are looking to choose an enterprise that provides all IT solutions under one roof, LI Tech Advisors are the industry's best. Being the top IT solutions provider in Long Island for over 30 years, we have an experienced team that ensures your business gets the best IT solutions in one place. Contact us today for more information.
Anthony has been in the MSP business since before the acronym existed. Managed IT once started as break-fix solutions and some light phone support.
Since then, he has seen the industry flourish into a landscape of platforms, cloud servers, software tools and AI . Tailoring network configurations and software stacks to the specific needs of each business.
In his current role, he focuses on proactive planning, ensuring clients can avoid potential issues altogether. This involves meticulous planning for enhanced business continuity, allowing swift resolution of any unforeseen challenges. What initially began as addressing "fires" through break-fix solutions has evolved into a proactive approach, ensuring that such issues are prevented from arising in the first place.
