Cloud-delivered filtering
Traffic inspection and category blocking applied wherever the user connects, including on mobile devices.
Cyber Security
Cloud Firewall & Secure Connectivity
Your firewall guards a building that not everyone works in any more, and the traffic that matters never touches it. We move the filtering to the cloud, so protection follows the person rather than the premises.
What this protects
Security that no longer stops at the door
An office firewall only protects the office. Once staff work somewhere else, an unprotected laptop becomes one of the easiest ways in.
Working away from the office
Remote and hybrid staff still need email, files and business systems. Unprotected traffic is an open route into all three.
The home-working gap
The office is controlled. Home routers, personal devices and public Wi-Fi are not, and that is where many incidents now begin.
Evidence of control
Logging and reporting show what was blocked and what was touched, which is what auditors and insurers want to see.
The perimeter moved, and it is not coming back
When everyone worked in one building, a firewall on the edge of the network was a complete answer. It is not now. Staff work from home, from customer sites, from a train. Their traffic goes straight to the internet and never touches your hardware.
The reasonable response is to move the policy to the cloud. Filtering, threat inspection and access decisions follow the user wherever they are connecting from, and you get one place to manage it rather than a stack of appliances per site.
It also solves a persistent irritation: rules that were opened for a project in 2019 and never closed, because nobody was confident enough to remove them. A modern policy is written per identity and per application, which makes it much easier to justify and to prune.
What we put in place
Identity-based rules
Policy attached to people and groups rather than IP addresses, so it survives a change of address or a new office.
Secure remote access
Access to internal systems without exposing them to the internet, verified per session rather than per network.
DNS protection
Blocks access to known malicious domains, which stops a large share of ransomware before anything executes.
Traffic logging
Searchable history for investigation, and evidence of what a compromised account actually touched.
Reporting
What is being blocked and why, which is genuinely useful for spotting the colleague who keeps clicking things.
Questions we get asked about Cloud Firewall & Secure Connectivity
Usually a lighter appliance or nothing at all, depending on the site and its connectivity. Where a physical device still earns its place we will say so rather than removing everything for the sake of it.
Cloud-delivered inspection adds an imperceptible amount in normal use. If a specific application suffers, it gets an exception. It is documented, unlike the undocumented ones we usually inherit.
Both. Most businesses block malicious sites as a default and then add categories where there is a reason, rather than blanket-blocking and creating a shadow IT problem.
A significant proportion of ransomware arrives via a domain that is already known to be malicious. Blocking the connection stops the attack at the cheapest possible point.
They go on a segregated network with no route to business systems, and they do not get to bypass policy. That separation is exactly what keeps one compromised personal laptop from being a company-wide incident.
Not sure whether you need cloud firewall & secure connectivity?
Book a free 60-minute health check. We will tell you what you actually need, including when the answer is nothing.