Commercially Available Firewalls - Essay Example

Commercially available Firewalls Grade (27th, Jan. Commercially available Firewalls NBK is a banking institution that faces the risk of having sensitive customer data stored in its computer database accessed and stolen by hackers, who may in turn use the same information to defraud the bank’s customers off their money. Losing such sensitive data could cause a big problem to the bank and its customers. Considering that there is a continuous flow of such sensitive information on the bank’s networks, through the transfer of customer data from the branches country wide to the head office, and among the bank branches, the protection of such data is inevitable.

Application-Layer Firewall, is the type of firewall that can address the vulnerabilities faced by NBK bank, since once the Application-Layer Firewall is installed, it will safeguard the bank’s data, since this type of firewall prevent all unwanted outside traffic from reaching protected machines (Venkatesulu & Kumar, 2012). This type of firewall works towards monitoring all browser traffic, or all telnet traffic, and intercepts or blocks the packets that do not match the set data traffic rules, since they are considered to be intrusive (Venkatesulu & Kumar, 2012).

To enhance the effective operation of the firewall once it is installed, fellow workers are supposed to understand that firewall does not protect the computers from all sort of harm, and thus should observe the following set of procedures: No use of external drives, CDs and DVDs, since Malware can be delivered to the computers through them. Avoid the use of any unauthorized connections such as Modems or wireless connection, since firewall does not protect against traffic or software that does not come through it (Venkatesulu & Kumar, 2012).

Reference Venkatesulu, D. & Kumar, N. (2012). Firewall: Testing of various commercially available firewalls in new operating systems. International Journal of Computer Science and Technology, 3 (1), 798-801.