| W18 | Weekachttien – Week one eight – deachttiendeweek
Because of the many threats lurking in the Internet, it is vital for a wise businessman such as yourself to invest in products that could safeguard your managed servers from any unsuspecting attack. To ensure that your servers will always have maximum security, even without your supervision, it is necessary to enlist the help of a good firewall that could block malicious requests before they even reach your server.
A firewall is a software program or a hardware contraption that filter out all the Information that tries to gain access to your server. It utilizes a method called packet filtering, which checks the incoming packet and analyzes it to make sure it is not flagged before it forwards the request to your server.
There are different types of firewalls that you can use for your managed servers’ needs: the network layer or packet filter, the application layer, the proxy and the network address translation. The network layer operates as a very low transmission control protocol and does not allow packets to pass through unless they will match the set of packets defined by the layer’s rules. The application layer takes care of the applications of your server. They intercept all of the packets that enter or leave your server’s applications.
With the use of a good firewall, any person from the Internet will not be able to gain entry through any of your machines especially since there is a small chance that your employees could unknowingly leave a hole for these hackers to attack.
A hardware firewall, when installed to your server has a predefined set of rules that will decide whether the information your server receives should be forwarded as request or dropped by your server. This predefined set of rules entail the use of packet filtering, which analyzes the header of a packet to find out the source of the information received by your server and its destination.
What’s good about this firewall is that it can be used by any person with a general knowledge about computers. He can simply plug the firewall in to his server and adjust a few or no settings to make it run on his managed servers. It is very easy to maintain because you only have to tinker with a single component as opposed to a software firewall that you must individually install and maintain in all of the machines in your network. (Thank you Kevin Abrahams)