Think of your home. When you leave your home or are sleeping at night, do you lock your doors and windows? The answer is most likely yes. It’s because this provides a level of security to your household and property. It is harder for one to access your house and cause harm or steal items when it is properly locked.

As locking the door safeguards your house, so does a firewall safeguard your cloud server. A firewall is a software or hardware that regulates access to a server. It blocks unwanted access to your server, allows access via certain protocols or ports only as well as keep unwanted things outside your server. They are the most effective way to secure the server yet the least understood. Hackers and other intruders are in the internet constantly looking for a server to devour. It is estimated that, 4 hours from when a new server is set up, it starts receiving security threats from hackers.

So, why does your server need a firewall?

• To minimise chances of a successful attack on your server – a firewall blocks ports, protocols and IPs to ensure vulnerable server access points are well barricaded.
• To block messages linking to unwanted content – you don’t want to be working on your computer and all of a sudden messages pop up from anonymous locations linking to content you are not interested in.
• To block unsuitable or immoral content – you can use a firewall to block specific online locations that have unsuitable content.

In conclusion, as long as you have operations in the internet such as emailing, website or appliation hosting, online gaming etc, make sure you do them while behind a firewall. It’ll protect you against dangers you see and those you can’t see – yet.