A firewall is an important tool for computer maintenance and protection. The name Firewall was aptly chosen, as it is a figurative wall which guards against outside influences. Firewalls can promise to do this because they prevent people inside of a system downloading external information from sources that have been blacklisted, or alternatively only allow transferring data from verified and “whitelisted” sources.

Firewall protection is something that can be acquired freely, for a fairly non-customisation system that is useful for a small, low stakes company that doesn’t need many requirements from it. Firewalls range from these freely available pieces of software, all the way to highly advanced, customisable, and robust systems that can be incredibly expensive.

These expensive Firewalls can come with a variety of fail-safes too, such as alarm/alert systems which alert people to an attempted breach, greater integration with account management systems so that you can provide different people with different levels and areas of access, and a lot more besides this.

In most cases, a cheap and easy to set up firewall is going to provide more than adequate protection for the types and veracity of risks small businesses are going to be exposed to. For larger businesses, such as banks, datacentres, and others which contain a lot of private information and the duty to protect it, choosing an expensive, highly robust Firewall is something that is worth considering.