Security – The Basics
Security, in the world of computers, is a never-ending battle between opposing forces. We have the obvious, good vs. evil, but we also have security vs. ease of use. Today we’ll discuss practical, time-tested recommendations for security at home and at the office.
Home Networks
Whether your home is where you work or where you play, security is still a requirement. The obvious first layer of security would be an up-to-date anti-virus product followed closely by an up-to-date anti-spyware product. Vendors such as Trend Micro and Symantec now offer products that combine both needs into one offering.
The next crucial layer would be your firewall. Here’s where we talk about ease of use. Many of the computer publications you will read recommend a software-based personal firewall. In our experience, these products ask far too many questions that you cannot accurately answer. By and large they do a good job, but if you answer the questions incorrectly you’ve just granted permission for something bad to happen. For ease of use, we recommend a hardware-based firewall that has something special: Stateful Packet Inspection, or SPI. Both Netgear and LinkSys offer cost-effective router/firewalls with SPI. SPI actually inspects all of the information packets that are flowing in and out to the internet, and you never have to answer questions.
Office Networks
The recommendations are essentially the same for the corporate environment with a few adjustments. In the corporate environment we prefer to see an anti-virus and anti-spyware product that is centrally managed. Centralized management allows us to verify the status of each computer on the network from one location as opposed to going to each PC, thus resulting in both a long-term cost savings in terms of labor and a greater likelihood of actually checking since it’s much easier to do so.
With respect to the firewall, again SPI is a requirement, and we would add that the bigger the network the faster the firewall needs to be so as not to become a bottleneck for everyone. For that reason, corporate firewalls are more costly than consumer-grade firewalls. SonicWall offers several models that are robust and cost effective.
