What is the roll of a firewall in a network, what would be the advantages of implementing a firewall??

Question

What is the roll of a firewall in a network, what would be the advantages of implementing a firewall??

Answer 1

The roll of a firewall is to give you control over what possible network entries are open on your computer.

These entries are called ports, and the firewall simply stops external access to those ports, and denies internal programs from using those ports.

Why is this important? Having external programs access open (non-firewalled) ports allows them possibly to control your machine. This control requires some program on your machine to accept commands over these ports. Microsoft, and other companies write programs that accept these commands over ports. A firewall on the machine will stop all these commands, a firewall on the local network will stop external access, while allowing internal access. Thus you might be able to access files on a server while within a firewall, but not externally.

In addition, a network firewall can eliminate floods of requests. This means the firewall is getting rid of these requests before they get to your machine. Thus you can work unaffected when thousands of machines are trying to kill your machine with a DDOS type of attack.

Answer 2

The idea of a firewall is to prevent unauthorized outside access (i.e., hacking) into your computer or network, to prevent downloading of or attacks from malicious software, and to prevent any malware that may be in your system from sending information out of your system. In other words, pretty important.

However, a firewall does not replace antivirus and antispyware software, nor is it designed to. It's only one element of a good defense.