Watchguard and SonicWALL Firewall: Best practices on protecting your device

As you may already be aware, your firewall is the first line of defense against security threats. However, merely adding firewall devices and security components to your network does not guarantee that it is safer. You must often monitor, examine, and optimize your firewall's parameters and system logs to safeguard your network.

The rules and regulations of any firewall provide the basis for its functionality. These might make your network vulnerable to assaults if they are not properly controlled.

Ensuring optimal rule compliance is a complex task for many security administrators. Businesses seek speedier networks, forcing security administrators to struggle between speed and security. Security administrators may use several firewall best practices to manage the speed vs. security dilemma in light of these difficulties.

Best Firewall practices

1. Save firewall rules

Writing firewall rules should always begin with a "deny all" rule. This guard against human mistakes on your network. Creating custom rules after testing and deploying them is a good idea.

• The justification behind a rule.
• The rule's inception date and the name of the security administrator who created it.
• The rules impacted users and services.
• The rules impacted devices and interfaces.
• Rule's date of expiry. 

2.  Reduce permissive regulations

When drafting a new rule or making changes to an existing one, you can provide this information as comments. Even though you'll only have to complete this process once, you'll end up saving a tonne of time while auditing and creating new rules in the future.

Include a "deny rest" at the bottom of the rules after testing and applying them. This guarantees that your firewall only lets through necessary traffic and denies the rest. Additionally, since employing too liberal policies like "allow any" might endanger your network, you should avoid using them.

3.  Periodically review firewall rules.

When new rules are created without first considering the existing ones, they might conflict with one another and become redundant, leading to anomalies that impair the operation of your firewall. It's necessary to frequently audit and delete duplicate rules, anomalies, and undesired policies to avoid clogging up your firewall's processor. Cleaning up unneeded rules also helps prevent problems. Your firewall's processing capacity can be increased by shifting the least-used rules to the bottom and placing the most frequently used rules at the top. Since different kinds of regulations are applied at different times, this activity should be done on a regular basis.

4. Evaluate the state of your rules.

A penetration test simulates a cyberattack on your computer system and looks for weaknesses that might be exploited. You can find weak points in your network's security by conducting periodic checks on your firewall

5. Automate security inspections

A manual or systematic technological inspection of the firewall is known as a security audit. It is crucial to regularly audit and document the outcomes of these jobs since they are a mix of human and automated operations. A technology that can automate processes and record outcomes from manual chores is necessary. This will make it easier to monitor how firewall configuration changes affect it.

6. Use a change management tool.

An end-to-end change administration technology that monitors and records changes from beginning to end is essential for effective policy management.

7. Describe real-time alert management strategy.

For effective firewall monitoring, a real-time alarm management system is essential.

• Real-time monitoring of the firewall's accessibility. A backup firewall must be installed right away if the primary firewall goes down so that all traffic may temporarily be routed via it.
• Set off alerts when the system comes under assault so that the problem can be fixed immediately.
• Set up alerts to notify you of all changes. This will make it easier for security administrators to monitor each change as it occurs.

8. Regularly evaluate security compliance.

Managing a healthy network requires regular internal audits as well as compliance checks for various security requirements. Depending on the standards you must follow, you must keep logs for a specific period of time. The laws governing how long logs must be kept for legal and auditing needs vary by country. See your legal counsel to find out which laws your company must abide by. To make sure you're complying with industry standards, you may automate compliance audits and checks to run on a regular basis.

9. Update the firmware and software.

Every network and firewall has flaws, and hackers always look for ways to exploit them. Even the finest firewall rules won't be able to prevent an attack if a known vulnerability isn't fixed. Regular firewall software and firmware upgrades help close known security holes in your system.

Conclusion

Suppose you find that managing cybersecurity effectively is becoming too complicated, complex, and changing too rapidly. The best SonicWALL provider  and Best watchguard vendor can help. They provide these crucial functions as a service and can handle your cybersecurity for you.

• High-performance security analysis that stops assaults and undesirable traffic without affecting mission-critical Internet usage.
• Most secure performance in its class, with the greatest real-time visibility tools and a vast feature set.