What to do when a Dragon Attacks Your Business

You know it's important to have a firewall to keep your data safe, but did you know the needs of your business demand stronger firewall software than what comes with your Windows operating system? When dealing with a complex business network, it's highly recommended that you go with a hardware firewall solution that's up for the task.

While the firewall that comes loaded with your Windows OS may be adequate to protect your home PC, when dealing with several different workstations, servers, and employees that make up a typical business IT infrastructure, a flimsy piece of software will be completely inadequate to defend your company's data from all the threats of the Internet. To explain why this is the case, we thought that, instead of getting all technical and talking about access points and network switches, we would illustrate our point by using dragons.

Dragons are big, mean, and scaly, and can do a lot damage, just like the Internet. If a fire-breathing dragon is the Internet, then your company's information stored on your network is like a princess high up in the castle tower. For a pretty princess, a tower is not a safe place to be when a dragon is flying around, and a dragon will target a princess in the same way that a hacker will go after your company's sensitive information.

When the princess is threatened by a dragon, a knight will ride in on a white stallion, climb the tower, and save the day by protecting the princess. The knight is similar to your firewall because its job is to protect everything valuable that belongs to you the king, like the data on your computer. One well-trained knight can easily fend off a slimy dragon with his shield, but things become more difficult when more princesses and more dragons are thrown into the mix.

Your business is your castle, and you have worked hard and fought many battles to expand your kingdom and fill your castle full of pretty pretty princesses. Having a big castle full of valuables is like having a complex IT infrastructure, because the bigger the castle is, the more riches it contains, which also means there are more angles that a dragon can attack from. In the same way, a large network contains many access points, and a hacker will try to take advantage of each one.

If your business/castle full of princesses is only protected by a lone knight, then he will have an impossible time protecting all the princesses and they will each be swooped up and taken to another castle. A lone knight is like a software firewall. The software knight is great at protecting one PC tower, but would be overwhelmed with the charge of protecting an entire castle.

As king of your castle, you might think the best solution is to hire an army of software knights and depend on each firewall that comes with every operating system on your workstations and servers, but this is weak solution because dragons (hackers) are great of finding vulnerabilities and will take advantage of a gap in your defenses to swoop in and steal your princesses.

The best way to protect your castle from dragons is with one fireproof solution, like a big protective dome that will keep all flying dragons away from your castle. Computerware offers this all-in-one firewall hardware solution with our Unified Threat Management (UTM) tool. Having one heavy duty firewall installed on your network will deflect the hackers of the Internet seeking to compromise your network. With only one firewall solution in place, instead of several small firewalls, there is no weak link and your princess will be safe.

Computerware can be your knight in shining armor, call us at (703) 821-8200 and we will slay any dragon threatening your castle.