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Firewalls are one of the most critical tools in any organization’s cybersecurity arsenal. They safeguard internal data from unauthorized access and potential cyber threats by granularly inspecting incoming and outgoing network traffic based on security rules. Firewalls can be hardware or software and act like gatekeepers for your system. They examine data packets, compare them to predefined security policies and then decide whether to accept, deny or drop them.

Firewall benefits include blocking attacks, reducing risk, supporting compliance and more. But what matters most is how well your firewall performs in your environment, aligning capabilities with your specific network architecture, threat landscape and operational needs.

Historically, firewalls were designed to prevent unauthorized access to your internal systems by acting as a barrier that monitored everything that came into or out of a device. But, just as the bricks in a real firewall stop a blaze from spreading between floors or rooms, modern firewall technologies have evolved to help protect networks from new and advanced threats.

Generally speaking, there are two types of firewalls: network-based and host-based. Network-based firewalls, which can be either hardware or software, are positioned between different networks and control incoming and outgoing traffic for each individual network segment. Host-based firewalls, on the other hand, are installed directly on individual devices (such as computers, servers or laptops) and control incoming and outgoing data that is unique to that particular machine. Also known as proxy firewalls, these are more sophisticated and operate at the application layer of the OSI model, examining a wider range of information in each data packet to identify malicious activities.