Rule reviews
A scheduled review of every rule, removing the ones opened for an old project and never closed.
Secure Communications
Managed Firewall
A firewall bought and forgotten gives protection on paper and open doors in practice, because the rule list quietly fills with temporary changes nobody ever closed. Managing it is what turns the device into real protection.
What this protects
Where configuration drift becomes risk
The hardware rarely fails you. The configuration is what erodes, one reasonable-looking rule at a time.
Rules that should never have stayed
Every temporary rule left open is a door. An attacker does not care that it was only meant to be there for a fortnight.
Firmware left behind
Appliance vulnerabilities are patched quietly by vendors and ignored by everyone else. Current firmware closes them.
Evidence that traffic is watched
Insurers and auditors want to know the traffic is monitored and the logs are kept. Monitoring produces both.
Having a firewall and managing one are different things
Almost every business we meet has a firewall. Far fewer have one anybody has looked at properly in the last two years. The device is doing its job; the configuration is the problem, and configuration drift is where protection actually lives.
Managed means three things. Somebody reviews the rules regularly instead of only adding to them. The device is patched and its firmware kept current. And the traffic passing through it is monitored, so an alert about something unusual does not depend on a human happening to notice.
What we actually do
Patching and firmware
Updates applied, including the security fixes vendors quietly release for appliances people forget about.
Traffic monitoring
What is leaving your network, what is trying to get in, and which anomalies deserve a phone call.
Segmentation
Guest, staff and device networks separated, so a compromised device is not sitting next to everything else.
Secure remote access
Access to internal systems delivered through identity and device checks rather than a blanket open port.
Cloud firewall
Protection for cloud services too, because plenty of the traffic entering your business never touches the office perimeter at all.
What we look for on a first review
- Rules marked temporary that are still there years later
- Any-to-any rules that effectively turn the firewall off from specific sources
- Administrative interfaces reachable from the internet
- Firmware several versions behind the current release
- No logging being retained, so nothing can be investigated afterwards
- Guest and business traffic sharing a single network segment
Questions we get asked about Managed Firewall
The hardware is only part of it. A firewall with a stale rule list, out-of-date firmware and no monitoring provides less protection than most people assume. Managing it is the difference.
Often not. We work with what you have if it is still supported and doing the job. We will tell you plainly when a device has reached the point where replacing it is cheaper than managing around it.
It filters traffic going to and from your cloud services, which the office perimeter cannot see. If a growing share of your staff and data sits in Microsoft 365 and similar platforms, the answer is increasingly yes.
At least every six months, and immediately after any project that needed a temporary change. The failures we find most often are rules nobody remembers adding.
In most cases yes, though the firewall is tightly bound to the network design, so we would want to understand the wider setup first.
Not sure whether you need managed firewall?
Book a free 60-minute health check. We will tell you what you actually need, including when the answer is nothing.