Installation of a firewall policy in a small office - home office Essay

Installation of a firewall policy in a small office - home office (SOHO) environment - Essay Example Consequentially, it has become inevitable to protect these environments from any attack. Though none can claim that a network is totally secure, advanced security measures need always be implemented. In SOHO network, to protect any external intrusion using a firewall, one can consider using either a hardware or software firewall. A hardware firewall is a digital edge device put in a network that serves to allow or disallow network transmissions. A firewall once installed, it protects a network from unauthorised access while permitting only legitimate communications to pass through the network. Most vendors of operating systems (OS) for personal computers include software-based firewall packages in the OSs to protect threats from the public Internet. Different types of firewalls can be implemented at different levels in a network but since in a SOHO environment cost implications are vastly considered, only one level of a firewall can be implemented (Briere et al., 2010). This single l evel of firewall application must be effective enough so as to ensure that any outbound communication is secure. The installation of a firewall is based upon several set of rules that play a great role in deciding the type of a firewall to employ and the overall effectiveness of it. It would an unimportant and impractically costly venture to implement a firewall policy for a large company’s network for a small office/home office network since this firewall would serve as a central offloading point for security-related activity. Through the installation of a firewall appliance in a SOHO environment, client systems can easily share Internet connections. Internet connections pose the main risk to every network whether in a shared or unshared environment. Hackers are constantly finding new ways either to create vulnerabilities in a highly secured network or even to attack any network that would have security vulnerabilities. As technology changes, application-level attacks are gr eatly advancing too. This whole situation has cause a huge tradeoff between the provision of a secure network and the cost of that provision. To secure a network especially one that has access to the Internet has proved to a challenging task to the network administrators since the more they put hard security measure both in hardware and software forms, the more attacks are being targeted and executed on their networks. This has led to the introduction of integrated firewall appliances e.g. gateways and routers, that handle both the work of data transmission and data screening at the perimeter wall. Clients in SOHO network depend a lot on emails. These emails can be outbound or inbound. Both should be screened at the firewall level to ensure that only legitimate emails are given access to the network. Emails carry attachments and security compromisers have always been bent on imitating their attacks using email attachment that contain worms, Trojans, spyware or even a malware. These embedded threats once that gain access to the network would cause undesired trouble in the stability of the network as some of them have the potential to iniatiate a denial of service attack. This attack is among the most hazardous on a network since the entire business is brought in to a halt. Another harmful attack would be the one initiated with intent