10 Firewall Features That Will Optimize Your Performance

According to Statista, 72.7% of organizations are affected by ransomware attacks globally. These attacks made companies vulnerable, costing money and tarnishing reputation. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, the global cost of cybercrime can reach $10.5 trillion annually. So organizations leveraging technology should incorporate firewalls into their systems to prevent challenges.

However, we will not talk about firewalls in this blog, rather we will highlight the ten firewall features that can help organizations to optimize their performance. Whether you are a small enterprise or a big organization, you should consider these features.

Application and Identity-Based Inspection

With time, organizations  replace obsolete or end of life applications with new applications to accomplish their certain goals. These applications work on different policies. For example, some applications might be of high -priority while some applications might be blocked or throttled. Hence, your firewall must identify the applications that can generate particular traffic and also apply policies based on the application.

However, network and security alone are not responsible for your organization’s security. Your organization’s policy also plays a crucial role in this. A firewall should be able to enforce the rules based on the person.

Antivirus/anti-malware

The network firewall security must have antivirus features so they can protect your system from ransom attacks. When you send or receive the files, they go through the firewall and the firewall checks them quickly to identify the virus. They check the specific patterns or codes that can be known viruses.

Web proxy and URL checking

While opting for a network and security firewall, you should ensure that your firewall comes with a web proxy and URL-checking features. It ensures that web traffic is safe and complies with your organization’s policy. It catches web content and stores copies of the frequently visited page locally. Additionally, it also inspects the URLs and determines if the URLs are safe. If they find malicious URLs, they can block access to it.

Threat Prevention

We have seen the annual cost of a cyber threat for an organization and cost will increase with the longevity of a cyber threat. Along with the direct expense, it can cost some additional expenses in numerous ways, like hefty fines, losing customers, and more.

Additionally, ransomware also decreases productivity, hinders the fines, and sometimes you can fail to comply with the regulatory compliance, leaving fines. These are the passive costs associated with the cyber threat. If you want to minimize the cost, your system must have threat-prevention features.

A network and security firewall must have threat prevention features so it can identify and block the attack before it crosses the boundary. Firewalls with these features can help your organization nullify the threat. You can also ensure that these features should have features, such as anti-malware, anti-bond, and anti-phishing.

Unified Security Management

The complexity of computer networks has become more complicated these days as devices are continuously added to the networks. It becomes difficult for an organization to secure everything.

A good firewall can actually help simplify things. If it has something called “Unified Security Management” (USM) built-in, it makes it easier for the security team to control everything with one tool. This lets them keep up with the growing number of ways hackers might try to attack and keep the company safe.

Hybrid Cloud Support

This firewall feature allows you to maintain uniform security policies across all your private and public cloud deployments.

Scalable Performance

As your organization adds users, devices, and applications, network traffic volume increases. A scalable firewall can handle this growth without experiencing performance degradation. New cyber threats emerge constantly. A scalable firewall can adapt by incorporating new security features and updates without sacrificing performance. By choosing a scalable firewall, you ensure it can accommodate your network’s needs even as they change in the future.

Application Layer Filtering

Firewalls having application layer filtering inspect data packets based on their addresses and protocols by digging deeper. It examines the actual content of the data to identify specific applications and their activities. By blocking unwanted applications or content, you reduce the overall traffic flowing through the network. This frees up bandwidth for critical applications and improves overall network speed. With less irrelevant traffic, the firewall can dedicate resources to critical tasks, leading to a more efficient use of system resources.

Intrusion Detection and Prevention

A firewall should have intrusion detection and prevention so they can safeguard your computer network from unauthorized people. With these capabilities, the network firewall security can monitor your system constantly and find suspicious activity or patterns. When it detects something fishy, it can utilize its prevention techniques and block them immediately. It can block malicious traffic, drop infected packets, or even shut down compromised connections.

These features of a firewall ensure that your system has increased processing load, false positives, and more.

High Availability and Load Balancing

A high availability (HA) firewall ensures that a network is protected even if one of the firewall devices fails. This is different from single firewall setups, which can lead to long downtimes when devices fail.

The Bottom Line!

While opting for a network firewall security firewall, you should ensure that the firewall has these features to protect your system from ransomware attacks. RIAM Enterprises understands this very well and recommends, provides and configures firewalls that suit your business needs.