Latest Blogs

By AMSAT Nov 13,2020

The Challenges of Firewall Management for Strong Protection

Firewalls, also known as network security devices, are a central element of any organization’s cybersecurity policy. A strong set of perimeter and internal firewalls on a network can help keep potentially harmful traffic out and decelerate the breakout speed of attacks arising from within the network.

Today, when corporate security has emerged as a head-scratcher for even some of the biggest conglomerates, it’s important to find challenges—and the ways to overcome them—for effective management of firewall for enhanced security.

The following is a brief list of some of the biggest challenges companies and individuals face in effectively managing firewalls, as well as some solid practices to overcome them:

Challenge #1: Choosing the Right Firewalls

Surprisingly, there are several types of firewall architectures to choose from. Many of these architectures are the outcome of building upon previous types of firewalls to enhance the security they provide. The essential sequence of firewalls in order of intricacy and protection goes something like this:

Packet-Filtering Firewalls.

The oldest and most rudimentary types of firewalls, they make a superficial check of data packet information such as target and origination addresses, packet type, and port number without opening the packet for closer examination.

Circuit-Level Gateways.

These basic firewall types tend to provide swift, low-impact authentication of data packets, while checking the transmission control protocol (TCP) handshake to confirm that the session is genuine. It is significant to note that they do not check the packet at all, so malware with a genuine TCP handshake can easily get along.

Stateful Inspection Firewalls.

These types of firewalls work as a blend of both packet filtering and circuit-level gateway technology, providing better security than either of the preceding two firewalls alone.

Application-Level Gateways.

These firewalls, also known as “proxy firewalls, prevent the data packet from interacting directly with the network. Instead, they examine the packet at the application
layer before interacting with the network. They comprise the identical protections as a stateful inspection firewall but may also add profound packet inspection to look at the contents of a data packet, potentially recognizing malware code that other firewalls might overlook.

So, which one of these firewalls should you choose for your organization? There’s no one specific firewall that you should opt for as several organizations use different firewalls and firewall management practices for diverse parts of their network to produce sturdy network segmentation and protection.

In addition, the choice of firewall that you use may also hinge on your organization’s explicit objectives. A firewall management process that works for one organization may not be just as effective as yours.

Challenge #2: Creating Robust Network Segmentation

Network segmentation is a major strategy for setting up defense-in-depth against cybercriminals. This also helps slow down attackers, and improve overall data protection. Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of network segmentation is that it makes enforcing a policy of least privilege much easier, while reducing the damage caused by a breach.

Due to these benefits, it’s important to configure firewall deployments in order to create robust network segmentation. The longer it takes hackers to escaping from one system to another, the more time your cybersecurity specialists have to recognize and prevent the breach. It also means decreasing the total amount of data and number of assets that cybercriminals can access immediately, limiting damage.

Challenge #3: Blocking unreceptive Traffic without Affecting Genuine Requests

While firewalls need to block potentially aggressive traffic, they also need to shun hampering valid traffic requests. Or else, it will bode badly for the network’s user experience, causing inconveniences and falling productivity. To offset this, it’s often indispensable to create tailored configurations for firewall settings to let through explicit traffic types while blocking others. Here, having a managed firewall service can help provide the know-how required to configure the firewall for better security and less intervention.

Challenge #4: Managing Firewall Program Updates

Since a number of firewall solutions are software-based, they need sporadic updates to their software to close likely flaws and to update their definitions of aggressive traffic. Keeping a firewall up-to-date is one of the most fundamental firewall management measures that organizations need to engage in, but such software updates are still easily missed when worn-out IT departments have other priorities.

TAGS