Cybersecurity has never been more important than it is today. Attacks by cybercriminals are more powerful and sophisticated than ever, and they are targeting at a wider range of businesses than ever before.
In fact, South Africa has the highest number of ransomware and email attacks in Africa, with more than half of all businesses impacted in the 12 months leading up to September 2022.
Those attacks are expensive too, with South African businesses forking out an average of R49,25-million any time they fall victim to a successful attack.
In this context, it’s vital that organisations use all the tools available to them, both to prevent attacks and to limit the damage of successful breaches. Among the oldest, but still vital, are firewalls.
First developed in the 1980s, firewalls act as a barrier between your computer network or device and the outside world in the form of the internet. They monitor all the data that tries to leave or enter your network and block anything they deem suspicious.
Tony Walt, co-founder and director of Port443, points out: “All firewalls may be created equal but they don’t stay that way.”
He cautions against assuming that the best firewall is the most expensive one. Instead, the real difference comes from ensuring that your organisation has a proper process in place to continuously validate the policies and configurations. Though firewalls remain an incredibly powerful defensive weapon, they need to be maintained and updated to remain effective.
“As is the case with almost all controls, it comes down to people, process and technology – although in this case, technology is the least important of the three,” Walt says. “Taking a ‘set and forget’ approach to any cybersecurity control can render it ineffective very quickly.”
Hence, he argues, organisations need to continually update and maintain their firewalls to ensure they can deal with the latest threats. This takes skill and time, but not maintaining firewalls can be much more expensive, he warns.