Next Generation Firewall's

I am always amazed at what I find when evaluating or installing a Next Generation Firewall of what I discover.

I recently placed a Palo Alto PA series firewall into someones network. They were having a difficult time identifying what there users were doing. Within 15 minutes of placing the firewall into the network, we discovered someone with bit torrent. The bad thing was that bit torrent was incoming, meaning users on the Internet were using a machine on that network to grab movies or other possilbe items stored on that machine.

Bit Torrents are also a good way to pickup and distribute viruses. 

This was also affecting bandwidth. I believe that the bit torrent was eating the available bandwidth, affecting the critcial work the client needed to perform.

My recommendation has been for sometime is to get a good firewall that can also identify were users are going. This will allow you to track down people or users who are potentially abusing the polices you have in place. It also prevents good employee's from doing bad things.

The Internet is a very dangerous place these days. With the botnets running around and with how easy it is to pick up spyware and malware, I would recommend that you consider a good next generation firewall that will help keep your network safe. Not doing so could put you and your users at great risk.

You can sign up for a eval here http://jsotechnology.com/demo/jso-security/utm.html.

You can also download the AVR report from Palo Alto networks and discover the most current network risks. http://www.jsotechnology.com/_pdfs/AVR.pdf