3 Reasons Your Company Needs a Managed Firewall

An up-to-date firewall can help you protect your organization’s network while allowing legitimate business communication to be sent and received. It keeps bad actors out and can be used to keep employees away from insecure or non-work-related sites.

While a firewall provides excellent security and protection, it needs monitoring and management. Monitoring your own firewall is a time-consuming, intensive, and expensive task that requires security expertise and regular upgrades. Many organizations lack the internal expertise, time, and capital to monitor their own firewalls around-the-clock. For these companies, a managed firewall is an affordable, effective solution.

How a Managed Firewall Works

A managed firewall is a service that offers enhanced threat management. Security experts monitor your firewall remotely and can help mitigate any potential threats. To accomplish this, they study your network traffic and learn what normal traffic looks like for your business. When any unusual activity is detected, it can be quickly identified and addressed.

In addition, your provider will perform routine traffic analysis and send regular reports to you so you will have a clear sense of your network traffic patterns and how your managed services team is managing threats to your network.

Expertise Made Affordable by The Economy of Scale

The beauty of IT services like managed firewall is their ability to leverage economies of scale to offer companies the cybersecurity they need, at a price they can afford. In the past, your only option was to create an in-house security solution for your network, which you had to pay for through a capital expenditure.

Here are 3 ways a managed firewall can enhance your company’s operations:

1. Protect against cybercrime

Cybercrime is a growing concern for businesses and citizens alike. According to a recent cybercrime report published by research firm Cybersecurity Ventures, cyberattack rates are climbing faster than any other crime and will cost the global economy $6 trillion annually by 2021.

A business that falls prey to a cybercriminal will face serious losses and a tough road ahead. According to a 2017 report published by the Better Business Bureau, half of all businesses would lose their profitability within a month if their critical data was lost.

With a managed firewall, business owners can avoid or mitigate the risk of a cyberattack or breach.

2. Meet compliance requirements

As the threat level of cyberattacks continues to grow, so does the burden of compliance regulations. Existing regulations such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, and Sarbanes Oxley continue to evolve with ever stricter and more technical compliance requirements. New regulations such as GDPR add to the complexity.

A managed firewall service provider with compliance expertise can ensure your company meets these legal requirements, avoiding the heavy penalties associated with negligence.

3. Ease burden of monitoring

The burden of round-the-clock monitoring can be heavy for many SMBs. For example, if you have a small IT department with just one security expert, it’s not possible for your staff to continuously monitor your network.

Most business owners need to stay focused on their core business activities; they don’t have time to become IT security experts. And hiring enough staff for 24/7 monitoring may be too expensive. A managed firewall solution solves both of these problems.

We Can Help

With the support of Managed Edge Security from FirstLight, you can shift the burden of network security, compliance, and monitoring to our team of security experts. With FirstLight’s Managed Edge Security solution, customers benefit from next-generation firewall services and unified threat mitigation to protect their network, Our experts work diligently to stay on top of emerging threats, current best practices, and compliance requirements.

Our security experts will continuously watch your network for anomalies, strange patterns, or any other indicators of potential threats. We can also take on routine tasks, including security updates and patches, to free your internal resources to help you accomplish more important tasks and projects.

We can provide high levels of security for your network and bill you on a monthly basis, as an OpEx. Through a carefully crafted Service Level Agreement (SLA), we will spell out our responsibilities and what you can expect from us in the event of a cyberattack on your network.

Call FirstLight today to find out how we can protect your company’s most critical data.