5 Essential Must-Have Features to Look in a Managed Next Generation Firewall

In today’s digital technology landscape, everything is interlinked to one another. Thus, every technology is vulnerable to cyber-attacks if the essential security measures are not in place. One of the majorly affected sectors is start-ups and small businesses; they easily become prey to malicious cyber hackers due to the lack of cybersecurity within organisations.   

Last year the global digital threat scenario vastly changed; now, businesses have shifted the responsibility of managing the firewall and organisation network security to the third-party vendors. A firewall is a fundamental element in an IT solution company to secure an organisation’s sensitive data and mitigate attack risk. Keeping this in mind, here are the top 5 must-have features to look into a managed next generation firewall.  

Antivirus/malware protection:  

Modern businesses continue to adopt collaboration platform for sharing, uploading and downloading files, they all pass through a next-gen firewall, and it can perform a basic inspection. A firewall helps to avoid the potential risks from shared contents. Organisations need an advanced firewall since a simple security tool cannot detect the hidden vulnerabilities inside the system, which the cybercriminal could exploit.  

Effective network security:   

A lot of organisations struggle to keep up with information feeds and policies and management into already overloaded security processes. A traditional firewall has thousands of security protocols followed by several application signatures and unnecessarily adds complexity by several magnitude orders. A managed next-gen firewall makes organisation network security simpler and better by applying policy based on user and application.  

Deep Packet Inspection:   

Another must for a managed NGFW is Deep packet inspection. This feature ensures that each incoming and outgoing packet is entirely examined to recognise malformed packets, known attacks, errors, and other anomalies. A packet data inspection is performed through several methods, which includes stream-based analysis, policy configuration, vulnerabilities signatures and many more.   

Cost-efficient:  

Cyber risks are inevitable and can target any business irrespective of size. As we mentioned earlier in this post, small business is often targeted by malicious hackers due to lack or improper IT security management. Also, many small organisations often look for a solution keeping the budget in mind. This way, while considering managed threat detection services for an organisation, it is important to remember the services associated with it should be cost-efficient.  

Advanced VPN technologies:  

Virtual private network technology is one of the essential elements for resilient and flexible connectivity. Many advanced firewalls feature IPsec VPN, which incorporates a set of security protocols that helps to maintain data protection from unauthorised access. An organisation must look for NGFWs capable of providing management tools to establish, configure and operate a VPN.  

Conclusion:  

In this ever-changing digital era, security expenses may no longer be an option, but it doesn’t imply that you can make a bad investment decision. There are several options available in the market to cater business security needs. When it comes to business security, we recommend to check out the IT security services of Damocles security. It has a wide scope of the best managed next generation firewall solutions which contains all the above features.