Its amazing how many SME's still do not spend the money to put a proper firewall in place and simply rely on their ADSL modem for the protection of their company network. Relying on your ADSL modem for firewall functionality is a bad idea, because it can end up costing your company money! Besides the fact that ADSL modem's are consumer devices, and relying on them to protect a corporate network is simply a disaster waiting to happen, they do not allow for the smart management of your bandwidth nor do they provide some of the more advanced features of a corporate firewall.  A corporate firewall can provide the following benefits:

• routing of local traffic over cheaper local links - Local bandwidth is much cheaper than International bandwidth. Most ADSL or broadband connections uses International accounts to access the Internet, meaning that even for local (i.e South African) traffic is charged at the much higher international rate. With a firewall you can purchase International and Local bandwidth separately and intelligently route local traffic over the cheaper local connection. Local traffic includes accessing any sites hosted in South Africa, such as banking and news sites, and connecting branches to head office. It also includes email traffic which in most organization is responsible for 25% of bandwidth usage,
• virtual private network access - your remote staff and branches can access head office resources securely over the Internet, or you can even access the office from home, to get hold of that spreadsheet you forgot to copy to your laptop on Friday before leaving the office!
• robust anti-virus and anti-span scanning of mails at the network perimeter - don't just rely on client side tools to stop spam and viruses. Let the firewall do the scanning for you, this way you can be guaranteed that the checks are actually happening and staff have not turned off the client side applications because they found them too restrictive,
• anti-phising protection - protection from phising sites and other scams via URL scanning of web site addresses,
• bandwidth usage limitation - prevent one user from taking down the Internet connection with their downloads, resulting in everyone else having to wait. Beside limiting user bandwidth usage you can also reserve or guarantee bandwidth for mission critical applications such as VOIP and mail,
• logging of user activities - If you don't monitor user activities you cannot find out where your money is being spent on bandwidth, and whether Internet usage is work related. Providing users with login credentials to access the Internet means you can restrict access on a per user basis and hold staff accountable for their actions,
• web caching proxies - A web caching proxy can significantly reduce your costs by caching frequently requested pages locally on your network. Companies have seen 20%-30% drops in bandwidth costs by making use of a web caching proxy.

These are only some of the benefits of a proper firewall and the big secret is, that it doesn't costs a lot to get a proper firewall in place! Contact us on 011-781 8014 for a quote!