3 Tips for Choosing a Firewall for Small Business

Threats have evolved. Has your security?

Most next-generation firewalls (NGFW) reduce risk by providing access control over applications. But they don’t go far enough to eliminate threats. Small and midsize businesses need to demand more from their firewall.

Tip 1: Effective Threat Protection

Job #1 of a firewall is to prevent breaches and keep your organization safe. Select a firewall that has these key capabilities.

• Superior visibility – You can’t protect against what you can’t see. Visibility into threat activity across users, hosts, networks, and infrastructure lets you see more threats and stop them faster.
• Advanced malware protection – Solutions designed to stop advanced attacks must go beyond point-in-time detection. Using continuous analysis capabilities, they’re able to detect, confirm, track, analyze, and remediate these threats.
• World-class threat intelligence – Security technologies are only as good as the intelligence that powers them. Make sure that your firewall is backed by a world-class threat intelligence organization.

Tip 2: Save Time and Reduce Costs

Small organizations face many of the same threats as enterprises but are also faced with limited budget and staff. Choose a firewall that helps you to accomplish more with less resources.

• Prevent breaches – The best cure is prevention. A solution that stops more threats will reduce the time needed for timely investigations.
• Automation – Advanced techniques like automated tuning, analytics, and threat correlation reduces the volume of manual work.
• Prioritized alerts – Using superior visibility and advanced analytics, an NGFW’s prioritized alerts to focus your efforts and save you time.

Tip 3: Ease of Use

Small businesses have limited resources. These qualities will make sure you get the most out of your firewall.

• Easy to buy – A firewall for small and mid-sized businesses need to be cost effective and have flexible purchase options. Look for a vendor that offers monthly payments with 0% financing.
• Easy to setup – Setup the firewall in minutes using an intuitive, guided workflow. Understand the system easily with visual representations of configured access rules.
• Easy to manage – Quickly understand access rules with the help of clean visual representations. Make policy changes with the click of a button. Access easy-to interpret summaries of risks found in your organization.