Importance of Firewalls

The firewalls have several essentials and, thus, the need for the organizations to implement them in their management systems. The first importance is that when installing and configuring firewalls in computers and the local networks, it helps significantly in preventing unwanted access to confidential information, which is mostly done by hackers (Kenworthy, 2014). The second one is that firewalls help in identifying and blocking any unwanted content. Thirdly is that firewalls help so much in handling or dealing with worms, viruses as well as the malware that affect computers and organization systems. The fourth importance is that firewalls dramatically helps the organization to have secure networks to keep their information confidential (Cooper & Guzik, 2014). This ensures that only those authorized to access the network do it, and no hacker can be able to get information from the systems of the organization. Last but not least, the firewalls have played a very significant role in organizations and individuals by assisting in keeping their private and sensitive information safe and secure from unauthorized people.

Demerits of Firewalls

Even though the firewalls have several advantages, it also has some disadvantages. To start with, the firewalls hardly prevent internal attacks on the organization’s systems and computers. The company’s workers can attack the organization’s systems (Salah et al., 2016). Secondly, it is costly for small organizations to afford to have firewalls in their systems. This becomes a challenge for most of the small companies, even if they are much willing to implement the firewalls since it is so expensive for them to afford (Dodis & Stephens-Davidowitz, 2016). The third demerit is that the operational process is a bit complex, and this is a problem for organizations since most of them lack IT experts. This means that the firewalls will not be performing well since there is no expert to conduct the operational process effectively.

Conclusion

Nearly all the organizations connected to the Internet have done the installation of the firewall. Therefore, most of the organizations do have a height of some guard against the threats that emanate from outside. The attackers do still explore the vulnerabilities that apply to the machines within a firewall only. Servers are as well targeted, mostly the net servers.  The attackers are, however, are aiming at domestic users, primarily those who are connected full-time connected to the internet’s that are less probable to be sheltered. These attackers take advantage of low-security awareness of home users and get through VPN connection to the inside of the organization. Since machines within the firewall are mostly prone to both attackers who breach the firewall as well as the hostile insiders, the usage of distributed firewall architecture is likely to increase. Simple forms of the distributed firewalls with private firewalls are being installed on the machines of individuals. Several organizations, however, will need individual firewalls to act in response towards the configurations directives from the middle policy server. Such kind of architecture will work as the subsequent stage in an arms race, as the central server and procedure, it makes use of becomes a particular target for the attackers.

Firewalls and restrictions commonly imposed by them have widely affected how the application-level protocols have evolved. The attacks that are developed have been affected by restrictions imposed by the firewalls. An example of this change is the rise in email-based attacks. More exciting progress includes the extension of the HTTP and port 80 for the new services. The use of HTTP could accomplish remote procedure calls and file-sharing. The overloading of HTTP has resulted in new security concerns. This has forced more organizations to start the use of a net proxy to manage remote services that are used by the sheltered machines. Co-evolution between the firewall designers and the developers of the protocol is likely to be seen in the future. This will happen until the designers of protocols that deems security during the initial development of the protocol.