Managed Firewall Services

A Firewall is a security device (either hardware and/or software) used to control traffic between two different networks. This is required to manage the transfer of data between networks that have differing levels of trust such as a private network and the Internet (a public network). By configuring a Firewall to filter all traffic based on the security policy, a secure gateway is established to prevent unauthorised or malicious activity accessing the internal network.

The most common type of Firewall is a Network Layer Firewall. They work by filtering all traffic on a packet by packet basis according to certain rules defined by the system administrator. These rules act on many attributes of network traffic such as source and destination IP address together with the source and destination ports. In addition filtering can also be performed on the type of service (such as Web Browsing or Email), protocols, and domain name of source, along with many others. The flexibility of these rules allows for a highly controlled method of filtering traffic, from very specific rules such as allowing all traffic on a certain port, to broad sweeping rules such as denying all traffic from a certain IP.