Cost-Effective Firewalls

Firewalls prevent unsolicited network entry to private networks by computer criminals. Only network responses that have been explicitly requested by authorized users will be permitted past the firewall.

(Example: when an authorized user requests a web page in their browser, only that web page response will be permitted to enter the corporate network from the Internet through the firewall; web pages not expressly requested by that user, which might have been transmitted by a computer criminal from the Internet, will not be able to enter that company's network through its firewall).

There are a great variety of firewalls to choose from, but SecurityAppraisers® only deploys those that are feature-rich yet cost-effective for most companies - in terms of not only their initial set-up expense, but also their recurring maintenance costs. By using firewalls that are good price-performers, it becomes more financially realistic to introduce multiple firewall layers to an enterprise, as opposed to just one for the Internet. This technique is known as Departmental Firewalling. [For example, you can deploy network controls to protect servers holding Accounting records from employees in other departments.]

There are four general classes of firewalls: Server Based, Application, Network Appliance, and Personal.