Warnock Inc. Technology Consultation for the Future

There are four main types of firewall technologies. Packet filtering firewalls are simple and cheap solutions. They provide good security to protect one device, such as a workstation or sever, but can only allow or deny connections by network address or port number. Circuit Level Gateways provide more protection than packet filtering devices and can protect several workstations by hiding the originators network address. They check connections at the session level by checking the “handshake” before allowing data to be sent. They are well suited to protect a home network. Application level firewalls provide protection for large networks by inspecting the data that passes through the network device. This provides a more complex configuration which can protect better, but requires more resources to implement. The most secure and efficient firewall device is the Stateful Multilayer Inspection firewall. This device implements protection found in the other three types of firewalls, and provides a faster, more efficient way of inspecting data. These devices are the most expensive and complicated to configure. Each device is
useful when placed in the proper place on a network. Firewalls must never be used as the only source of security and are just a part of the multi-layer defenses on a network.