Many people are under the false impression that because they have a firewall or personal firewall software that they do not need antivirus software. Or because they have antivirus software they do not need a firewall.

Both antivirus software and a firewall are important in order to protect your computers from today's multi-pronged computer attacks.

For example, a firewall's job is to prevent attackers from gaining access to your computer or network, essentially keeping out the bad-guys. Technically a firewall is a device (or software) used to regulate the traffic between two separate network areas. The networks most people are familiar with are your Local Area Network (the computers in your office) and the Internet (all computers attached to the Internet are actually sharing a network). Firewalls can actually be used within LANs as well, a good example being a city or town situation where the police department shares a network with the rest of the city/town. In that case you would not want unauthorized people coming from the city/town to be able to simply "look around" the police department's network.

With firewalls, I am constantly asked if a software based firewall is adequate. There are many products out there (Windows XP SP2 has a built in software firewall as well as ZoneAlarm ,Symantec and McAfee are just a few popular ones) but I prefer the security a hardware based firewall provides. Software can crash, be compromised, shut down or be configured incorrectly by the end user. Hardware based firewalls are much more resilient and typically not administered by the end users. Small office firewalls can also incorporate wireless networking features and reduce the amount of networking equipment needed.

Antivirus software is used to prevent your computer from being infected by computer viruses. Most viruses today come from either an infected e-mail attachment or infected files from an employee's home computer they have brought into work with them. Antivirus software falls into two categories, typically a "home user" version as well as a "corporate" or "enterprise" version. The benefits to using the corporate or enterprise versions at your office ranges from being able to centrally manage virus pattern deployment to disabling the ability for end users to disable or turn off this all important protection.

There are also several products on the market today that can act not only as a firewall but also an antivirus gateway that inspects all traffic going in and out of your network for viruses.

If you think your network is at risk, contact us today for an network security evaluation.

-----