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How Managed Firewalls Can Help Fill Compliance Gaps

Firewall management is a necessary but tedious and time-consuming effort. It also requires industry-specific expertise in order to avoid costly security breaches which can jeopardize compliance requirements.

Meeting compliance requirements for your specific industry can occupy a significant amount of your IT professional’s time. Additionally, it can be difficult to find an IT expert with the appropriate industry experience to ensure all of your compliance requirements are met and your network is protected against unauthorized access.

When you choose to manage firewalls in-house, this requires a resource-intensive effort since it involves device deployment and configuration, constant upgrades and security patching, in addition, to monitoring upgrades to ensure the appropriate controls are installed to meet necessary changes in business processes. Then the network traffic must be continually monitored for threats so these can be acted upon in a timely manner to avoid costly breaches.

How a Managed Firewall Service Can Help

The above concerns we mentioned are the primary reason why many businesses are opting to choose managed firewall services in order to save on costs, eliminate time-consuming tasks, and meet compliance standards in an affordable manner. When you use a quality firewall management service that employs a team of experts, firewalls can easily be managed while meeting specific compliance requirements and protecting your organization.

A managed firewall service can help you with the following requirements:

• 24/7 Monitoring and Protection: It can be very costly to employ IT personnel around the clock to ensure your network is properly monitored and protected from threats. By using a firewall management service, you have access to the expertise you need to ensure security is monitored across your network and potential threats are responded to in a timely fashion. A reputable firewall management service deploys the intelligence tools you need to quickly identify security threats, as well as analyze firewall logs and improve policies and procedures.
• Appliance Management: Firewall appliances must be continually maintained and monitored to meet security standards and compliance requirements. A managed firewall service can help you to reduce overhead costs by providing you with access to a team of certified experts that are capable of performing specific tasks which assist with optimizing a firewall infrastructure.
• Access Control and Log Analysis: Depending upon the size of your IT infrastructure, reviewing logs and monitoring access control can consume a lot of resources. It can also make meeting compliance requirements such as Payment Card Industry (PCI), ISO, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) standards. A managed firewall service can provide you with on-demand reporting which helps your organization to demonstrate control efficiency and compliance to security auditors and upper-level management.
• Performance Optimization: Firewall architecture requires an investment of time and resources to be certain the appliances are performing at their optimal level. Managed firewall services provide you with access to a team of experts which are skilled with end-to-end firewall management. This provides businesses with the piece of mind that they are getting the most out of the firewall infrastructure and it is always running at maximum level.
• Risk Management: When a firewall is not managed and maintained properly, this can end up being costly in terms of security breaches and service disruptions. When you use a managed firewall provider, their team of engineers continually perform real-time security and health checks, daily backups, peer reviews, device upgrades and patch management, as well as other tasks which reduce downtime and security risks.

Firewall management is a primary network defense for all businesses and typically demands more time from IT managers than other infrastructure responsibilities. It is also easy to perform firewall tasks incorrectly since many IT administrators are burdened with multiple IT tasks and responsibilities. This is why many businesses are turning to managed firewall services to ensure compliance gaps are filled and the network is secure against unauthorized access.

To learn more about managed firewall services, contact Thrive Networks to speak with one of our experts.