It may sound a little cliché, but technology is constantly changing. That means that your business technology has to continuously change with it. You have to refresh workstations that can no longer support new operating systems and software and you have to update your network to accommodate security holes and changing technology. Your business firewall and router are no exception. As the traffic police, they help filter out potential breaches, and these breaches happen fairly frequently. How frequently? According to our IT security infographic, 1 out of 5 small businesses fall victim to cyber-crime every year. Even worse, cyber-attacks targeting small businesses grew 300% in 2014. Replacing your firewall or router could help make sure that your traffic police are still protecting you from intrusion.
Here are three reasons to consider replacing your business firewall or router:
- It doesn’t inspect encrypted traffic
According to Dell, by the end of 2016, more than two-thirds of all internet traffic will be encrypted. Even some network administrators don’t realize that viruses and malware are riding into their network via encryption. That means that they’re relying on the second line of defense at the server and workstation level to protect against malware attacks. Rather than allowing this traffic into your network, replacing your router or firewall for one that reads encryption could help filter out any potential threats.
- It doesn’t scan the internal network
Your router or firewall needs to do more than scan your external traffic. It also needs to scan your internal traffic. An internal vulnerability scan occurs inside your business’ firewalls to identify the actual and potential vulnerabilities inside your business network. The truth is that a significant portion of threats can occur from inside your organization, whether on accident or on purpose from employees. Systems can be targeted from the inside, or from a device inside your network that was brought in from the outside, like a USB stick or personal computer. If your firewall doesn’t have the ability to scan internal traffic, you’re missing a huge opportunity to nip breaches.
- The baseline services are out of date
Just like your antivirus and operating system definitions and patches need to be updated, the baseline services on your firewall or router need updating as well. Make sure that you’re taking the time to update your services to make sure that your firewall and router can detect the most up to date threats and attacks. Just like antivirus, if a baseline service isn’t updated it could mean that your network is left vulnerable to new threats.
For the most part, once your IT professional sets up our network – you forget about it unless a problem arises. When that problem arises (no connectivity for example), you reset things and hope that fixes it. But what you forget is that your network should be monitored 24 hours a day, updated and be continually blocking threats and attacks from the outside and inside your network.
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