General Reasons for a Firewall

[TechBoyJK]

I am trying to build a list of reasons to have a firewall in an enterprise situation. I know this is kind of a vague request, but I am looking for some of the "obvious" answers that might not be so obvious to someone who doesn't have alot or any experience with networking/internet/servers. If you have the time, could you list a few reasons why a firewall is necessary. I am looking for an open ended discussion if anybody is interested.

 

[spidey07]

Oh boy, where to start.

First off I would approach the other way. "name one reason NOT to have one".

1) Firewall is the number one defense against the rest of the world from hacking your machines and your entire network.
2) Allows blocking of inbound and outbound applications. Recent Internet worms were stopped by firewalls, without them the entire network is hosed.
3) Logging of any suspicous activity
4) It is absolutely necessary if you connect to the internet in a business network. IT IS NOT EVEN AN OPTION. IT IS A REQUIREMENT.

 

[TechBoyJK]

Thanks Spidey, this is the kind of input I am looking for. Anybody else?

 

[vi edit]

Other reasons -

VPN access
Bandwith metering
NAT
port forwarding
one to one nat
content blocking

 

[azev]

IT IS NOT EVEN AN OPTION. IT IS A REQUIREMENT.

Do you know how fast your computer can get infected with virus/worm/trojan, etc in the intraweb ??

I took a cleaned installed laptop and used dial up connection to the internet and browse the web for maybe 15-20 minutes. I check email using outlook, and just browse the web. Soon after the RPC buffer overflow window pops up. My computer shut down, then I reboot, install antivirus, and guess what, there are lots of virus in just 15-20 minutes of internet activity. AND you're asking why do you want a firewall protecting your network ?????

 

[TechBoyJK]

Oh i know why to have a firewall.....

 

[mboy]

Ask the enterprise how much it would cost them to have an unuseable network. Ask them how much their confidential data is worth to them. If they answer $0 to both, then they don't need a firewall.

 

[martind1]

just make the comparision to a condom.


if you dont use a condom ...
you might NOT catch aids ....
but what is the price if you do?
is your health worth $3?

if you dont use a firewall ...
you might NOT get infected by SoBig ...
but what is the price if you do?
Is your network health worth ~$200?


a little lowbrow but kind of drives it home.

 

[gaidin123]

Some enterprise decision makers might like these reasons:
You can monitor and selectively block certain types of traffic from exiting your network (such as IM, games, whatever). You can control who has access to your internal, departmental servers. You get to block webcrawlers and bots from scouring your corporate webservers and listing their contents in public search engines. You raise the bar for the level of intelligence needed to hack into your network. You may pay less for lower bandwidth usage and you will have a more efficient internal network. All of the other reasons people have listed so far are great. Really, you only need a one good hack to justify spending a lot of money/time securing your network. 🙂

The only possible downside to a firewall is that it does its job too well and limits legitimate access. This is mainly an education/knowledge problem and once you get your firewall rules set up the first time, the maintenance phase is generally pretty painless.

Gaidin