Need a write a discussion and two replies for the two discussions from the class mates

Discussion 1

Kiran Singh Thakur 

discussion week 11

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A commercial software firewall is designed to provide a security layer to allow a network of servers and computers to communicate over the internet. The advantage of a commercial software firewall is that they have very few resources. While these are not as big as traditional firewalls, they are usually still necessary. The disadvantage of a commercial software firewall is that they are usually expensive. A commercial software firewall is not about a hardware firewall because many people believe it is. It is not about a hardware firewall because commercial software firewall is not what it should be. This is because most people do not understand why they are using a commercial software firewall instead of a hardware firewall (Escolar et al., 2020).

Open-source firewalls are firewall software that is based on open-source software. The first firewalls were developed to ensure a healthy Internet connection in an organization. However, with the rapid development of firewalls in the open-source world, it is difficult for organizations to maintain the same security level. Therefore, many open-source software projects use different open source technologies to ensure a similar security level. This gives a sense of security, but it is not that hard to implement, either (Sampaio & Bernardino, 2017).

They both tend to offer an adequate level of customization. It is usually the case that there are more tools than firewall tools. Open source firewalls also have a lot more options than commercial ones. Moreover, some commercial products allow more protection than an open-source firewall. So that is why there are more commercial products than open-source ones and they are easier to get installed. However, some companies also have products that are almost entirely built on top of it. The examples are Linux servers, Windows servers, Apache, and PHP. Moreover, some software is very different from each other. Open source firewall does not allow more things to be excluded, while commercial firewall does allow that (Sampaio & Bernardino, 2017).

The commercial software firewall has many advantages over a Linux firewall; however, the open-source firewall is not open source and cannot enforce the security policy. In an open-source software firewall, the software is distributed through a set of software license agreements. A commercial software firewall does not support the type of protection that open-source software does, the protection that will allow the application to talk to other servers (Escolar et al., 2020).

 

References

Escolar, A. M., Calero, J. M. A., & Wang, Q. (2020, June). Highly-Scalable Software Firewall Supporting One Million Rules for 5G NB-IoT Networks. In ICC 2020-2020 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

Sampaio, D., & Bernardino, J. (2017, April). Evaluation of Firewall Open Source Software. In WEBIST (pp. 356-362).

 

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Discussion 2

Week 11

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New firewall checklist

Firewalls play a critical role in securing a network perimeter of any organization. Having a firewall that is effective in securing a network leaves no chance for attackers to compromise the whole IT infrastructure. When purchasing a new firewall for an organization, it is necessary to ensure that it has features not provided by the traditional firewall(Wood,2017).  This post discusses the checklist for a new firewall.

The new firewall should be able to protect the network security from data breaches. Any firewall can prevent breaches from occurring but, not every firewall can stop complicated malware infection. To avoid such scenario, a new firewall should be able to detect attacks before escalating in a network, and ability to configure URLs to conform to particular security policies(Quinn, Souppaya, Cook & Scarfone,2017). 

The new firewall should be able observe the entire network. Leaving parts of the network unmonitored omits potential security threat which might lead to data breaches if not addressed. Therefore, the new firewall should be able to monitor every network’s hosts.

The new firewall should be result-oriented. This means that it should be able to deliver scan results in seconds and report any intrusion within a 1 hour window.

(Cisco.com, n.d).

 

References

Wood, M. (2017). Top requirements on the SD-WAN security checklist. Network Security, 2017(7), 9-11.

Cisco.com (n.d). What is a next-generation firewall?

             https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/firewalls/what-is-a-next-generation-firewall.html

Quinn, S., Souppaya, M., Cook, M., & Scarfone, K. (2017). National Checklist Program for IT Products: Guidelines for Checklist Users and Developers (No. NIST Special Publication (SP) 800-70 Rev. 4 (Draft)). National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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