INTRODUCTION TO FIREWALLS

You have heard so many times “use firewalls to protect your computer”, in this article we are going to talk about firewalls. You may even already have a firewall management program in place. But what exactly is firewall security.

The word firewall means to a wall, which was constructed to halt the spread of a fire. In computing firewall refers to the network device which blocks certain kind of traffic by limiting the number of ports.

 Either firewall is a software based or a combination of hardware and software that are used for protecting purpose.

There are two different types of firewalls available:

1. Hardware Firewall:

A hardware based firewall is a physical device that place between your computer and the internet, it acts as a gateway to all the computer inside the network.

An example of a hardware based firewall is a broadband router. The main advantage of using hardware based firewall is that you need not to install or configure  any software because the firewall is external to the computer.

The main disadvantage is that, if your computer is mobility like your notebook than you cant use hardware based firewall.

2. Software Firewall:

A software firewall perform all the task like a hardware firewall, however software based firewalls  must be installed as a program on your computer. You can install and configure software firewall by using a dick or you can download from internet.

Software firewall has to installed on each host on the network while a hardware firewall used on the gateway of network.

Software firewalls are used for your laptop or for a single computer.