The Business Need for Firewalls

In today’s complex security environments, a firewall has to perform a variety of tasks.  Its primary function is to act as the gatekeeper at your organisation’s perimeter - ensuring that only legitimate traffic is allowed into and out of your network.  In addition, the firewall is frequently the termination point for virtual private networks to branch offices, suppliers and trusted partners.  As the Internet has become critical to achieving high availability for business, failover solutions are increasingly vital. 

With a distributed environment, organisations often have many firewalls and firewall management therefore becomes an important consideration.  This is especially true in environments where strict adherence to a compliance standard is necessary, such as health and other public sector organisations, or ensuring PCI compliance for retail.

The Solution

Every organisation is different and its firewall needs will therefore vary:

• Is high availability a requirement and if so, do you need additional site resilience in a DR situation?
• Are there any compliance issues (e.g. PCI, SoX, NHS, EAL requirements)?
• What VPN or remote access requirements are likely?
• What is the attitude to logging and log management?

The answer to these and other questions will allow Network Defence to specify the correct solution for your firewall needs. 

Why work with Network Defence?

Network Defence specialises in selecting and implementing the correct firewall solution for each organisation - based on the number of users, traffic flows and management capabilities.  Once your firewall solution is installed we offer a range of management options, from reactive support through to a fully managed service that ensures optimum performance.

For most organisations, your firewall infrastructure is the central part of your security solution.  Deploying and managing a firewall estate is a highly skilled operation and the consequences of a mistake are often very costly.  For this reason, many organisations rely on external assistance to manage change on their firewall estate.  Network Defence has many years of experience in managing complex firewall environments for high security organisations, including:

• Hospitals
• Police forces
• Financial service institutions
• Defence contractors

We can help you to manage your firewalls safely and effectively - fitting our solution to your specific needs and budget.

Contact us today to find out more

Network Defence Firewall Appliance Partners

• StoneGate Appliances

  • The StoneGate solution delivers an extremely cost effective firewall infrastructure with a number of impressive benefits.  The solution set is well suited to a distributed environment with a range of appliances from SOHO through to enterprise data centre.  All the appliances have the same interface.  Benefits include:

    • Ability to load balancing across ISP links, giving your business better Internet throughput
    • Automatic failover across ISP links, ensuring your business has maximum up-time
    • Automatic failover of VPN connections, reducing downtime of important links
    • Easy to use QoS setup, ensuring traffic such as voice or video is delivered in a timely fashion
    • Integration with separate StoneGate IPS firewall, protecting you from complex threats
    • Easy to use management and alerting, providing important information easily
    • EAL4+ compliance options available

    Stonesoft's Next Generation Firewall is recommended by NSS Labs - http://ngfw.stonesoft.com/networkdefence

    Contact Network Defence to find out more

• Cisco ASA Firewalls

  • The Cisco ASA range has appliances ranging from a SOHO size through to multi-Gbps throughput and is the cornerstone of Cisco’s security service offering.  The solution can be easily deployed in a high availability environment and has strong integration with other Cisco hardware solutions, as it can be deployed as a blade into a number of Cisco network appliances.

    Cisco provides a number of hardware and software enhancements for the basic firewall.  For many models, an IPS module can be added to provide a tightly integrated intrusion prevention service.  Software options include web and email content management solutions for organisations that do not want to deploy separate content management systems.

    Network Defence has been working with Cisco for 15 years and we have huge experience of delivering ASA solutions in complex and challenging security environments.

    Contact Network Defence to find out more