A firewall is one of the integral layers of cyber security strategy. It monitors all incoming and outgoing traffic through your network. Moreover, it has the capability to stop threats from impacting user devices and other endpoints when they try to pass the gateway to your network. In other words, we can say that a firewall is a tool that is meant to block unauthorized access to your system and acts as the first line of defense for a network. A company’s network without a firewall is more susceptible to falling victim to cyber threats like ransomware, botnets, and more.
Apart from the easy installation and configuration of the firewall, which makes it accessible to everyone even with less IT knowledge, it has many features that help an organization and individuals. Some of the most common yet essential features of a standard firewall in protecting your network are:
- Filters incoming and outgoing data and responses,
- Determines whether the information is authorized,
- It helps you determine whether the requested sessions are legitimate,
- Hides and protect computers behind themselves by connecting systems in different networks using a proxy server.
Moreover, not all firewalls are structured to be used by individual clients and business firms. A firewall is categorized into two grades – consumer-grade and business-grade. A consumer-grade firewall is provided by an ISP and is used in residential routers. In contrast, the companies choose business-grade firewalls as they last longer and have more security and daily business use capabilities.
Difference Between Consumer-Grade & Business-Grade
Companies and organizations always prefer business-grade firewalls over consumer-grade firewalls due to several reasons, especially because of their capabilities and high security. Moreover, a business owner will never prefer buying home firewalls for their organization as it will cost them in performance and productivity in the long run. Moreover, there are several other differentiating factors between consumer-grade and business-grade firewalls. Here we have discussed some of the prime differences between the two.
Security
A consumer-grade firewall always compromises security over speed, and they are not designed to handle regular business traffic. However, a business-grade firewall offers much higher level protection against all types of threats and is more efficient in catching them. In addition, business-grade firewalls offer advanced security features that include:
- Web filtering and the ability to block malicious sites
- Multi-engine sandbox to help catch daily zero-day threats
- Antivirus and antimalware software to protect the entire network
- Real-time deep memory inspection to block future attacks.
Management Over Application
A business-grade firewall has the ability to prevent unauthorized and rogue applications from running. Moreover, it limits the amount of bandwidth these rogue applications use. It also allows you to apply security policies that impact user network activity, ensuring that no employee can use unsafe practices that result in malware. However, the consumer-grade firewall doesn’t have the same tools that prevent the rogue application from eating up your network, causing a log jam with all other traffic.
Warranty Support
A consumer-grade firewall doesn’t cover you under warranty and is not designed for the demand of a business network as it includes exclusions from business use in the warranty. However, when using a business-grade firewall, you don’t need to worry about the warranty exclusion as it is built for business purposes.
Intrusion Detection
A business-grade firewall has advanced intrusion detection that includes logs that provide you the option to see if any unusual activity or attempts happened to gain your network’s accessibility. In contrast, the same detailed level of intrusion is not offered in the consumer-grade firewall. Moreover, a consumer-grade firewall limits the ability to see patterns in the bandwidth usage and login attempts that signal a breach attempt in your network.
Conclusion
If you use a firewall for business purposes, never settle with the consumer-grade firewall. A business-grade firewall provides you with an aggressively proactive feature set that protects your network strongly and offers you the option to customize the warranty policies for your network. Professional business-grade firewall services from a trusted firm like Zonure Technologies are a much wiser investment to provide your organization with strong security, performance, and peace of mind. If you want to get other IT services for your organization, visit Zonure Technologies to get our trusted services.
Reference:
Flusche, C.H.R.I.S. 2020. Business-grade-utm-firewall. 6th Feb. All Firewalls Are Not Created Equal! Why You Need a Business Grade UTM Firewall. [Online]. [5 February 2022]. Available from: https://texasitpros.com/business-grade-utm-firewall/