Advantage and Disadvantage of Firewall

Advantages of Firewall

1. Monitor Traffic

A major responsibility of a firewall is to monitor the traffic passing through it. Whatever the information traveling through a network is in the form of packets. Firewall inspects each of these packets for any hazardous threats. If any chance the firewall happens to find them it will immediately block them.

2. Protection against Trojans

Malwares especially the type Trojans are dangerous to a user. A Trojan silently sits on your computer spying over all the works you do with it. Whatever the information they gather will be sent to a web server. Obviously you will not know their presence until the strange behaviours of your computer. A firewall in this instance will immediately block Trojans before they cause any damages to your system.

3. Prevent Hackers

Hackers on the internet constantly look for computers in order for carrying out their illegal activities. When the hackers happen to find such computers they will start to do even malicious activities such as spreading viruses. Apart from those hackers there can be unknown people such as the neighbours looking out for an open internet connection. Hence to prevent such intrusions it is a good idea to be with a firewall security.

4. Access Control

Firewalls comes with an access policy that can be implemented for certain hosts and services. Some hosts can be exploited with the attackers. So the best in case is to block such hosts from accessing the system. If a user feels that they need protection from these types of unwanted access, this access policy can be enforced.

5. Better Privacy

Privacy is one of the major concerns of a user. Hackers constantly look out for privacy informations for getting clues about the user. But by using a firewall many of the services offered by a site such as the domain name service and the finger can be blocked. Hence the hackers are with no chance of getting privacy details. Additionally firewalls can block the DNS informations of the site system. Due to this the names and the IP address will not be visible to the attackers.

Disadvantages of Firewall

1. Cost

Firewalls does have an investment depending on the types of it. In general hardware firewalls are more expensive than the software firewalls. Besides that hardware firewalls require installations and maintenance which can be costly. These types of configurations cannot be done without an expert IT employee. Comparing this to a software firewall, there is no much investment and it is easy enough for an average user to deploy them.

2. User Restriction

It is no doubt that firewalls prevent unauthorized access to your system from the network. While this can be advantageous for an average user, this can actually be a problem for large organizations. The policies used by the firewall cab be strict enough to prevent employees from doing certain operations. As a result of this, the overall productivity of the company an be affected severely. Sometimes this can also prompt employees from using backdoor exploits. However this can lead to security problems since the data travelled through these backdoor exploits are not examined properly.

3. Performance

Firewalls especially the software based has the capability to limit your computer’s overall performance. The processing power and the RAM resources are some of the factors which decides the computer’s overall performance. When the software firewalls constantly run on the background they consume more the processing power and the RAM resources. This can lead to a diminished system performance. However hardware firewalls does not impact the system performance since they do not rely upon the computer resources.

4. Malware Attacks

Even though firewalls has the capability to block the basic types of trojans, it is proved to be defenseless against other types of malwares. These types of malwares can enter your system in the form of trusted data. Therefore even if you have firewall, it is still recommended to have an anti-malware software installed on your PC. Because the only way to remove them is through an anti-malware scan.

5. Complex Operations

Even though for small businesses the firewall maintenance is made easy, it is definitely not for large organizations. Firewalls for large organizations require separate set of staffs for operating them. These people make sure that the firewall is safe enough to protect the network from intruders.