Staying Secure – Firewall Management Can be Outsourced for Cost Effectiveness and Peace of Mind.
-By Manny Peterson
Even the strongest walls of any fort or castle can come crashing down from enough determined assault. That’s why sentries are posted atop of the walls to keep a constant watch for invaders. The same should be true of the walls set up to defend your company’s network. Too often there is the opinion that once built, a firewall should be able to constantly withstand the onslaught of unwanted and determined invaders looking for any crack in the wall to exploit to break through and compromise your network, or even set up a base-camp for further activity and assaults.
Manufacturers of Firewall software and hardware would like you to believe their products' intuitive interfaces and intelligent engines enable anyone to install and manage a firewall; sadly we are finding out otherwise. Your company’s network administrators must be familiar with TCP/IP, Internet services, firewall strategies, VPNs (virtual private networks) and encryption to roll out and manage a firewall. And that experience takes time and money to develop.
The estimated the costs on average for one network administrator to spend 30 percent of his or her time managing firewalls during the first year of installation are fairly daunting. The total cost in time, training and materials is roughly $125,000. Finally, when you add in the existing WAN costs of a minimum of $75,000 to the mix, your grand total rockets to $200,000 for the first year of operation.
In choosing managed firewall services, cost isn't the only consideration there is also peace of mind. The total cost referred to before doesn't account for 24x7 monitoring, the expertise and experienced talent gained by using a firewall service provider, and the initial and ongoing security monitoring and assessment. These extra features might shape your company’s decision to outsource: value-added support such as initial consulting and security auditing; ongoing, proactive security management such as: configuration changes, back-up configuration, fault and failure resolution, software or firmware upgrades, hardware upgrades and/or replacement, and managing client and site-to-site VPNs. This then is all communicated with you via generated reports and monitor logs, and all documentation is maintained and kept current for regulation compliance and audits.
Combining such features at a lower overall cost and greater peace of mind make sense not only for your bottom line, but an outsourced firewall managed service can shore up all the other lines that make up your company’s defense and prevent you from being exposed.
Manny Peterson is the Security Specialist at Clear North Technologies. Clear North provides technology services and support for businesses. They are experts in networking, storage, security, and outsourced managed services such as Network and Desktop Management.
