4 Important Benefits of Having a Firewall That Can “Geofence”

Cybersecurity has come a long way from using an antivirus on a computer and now encompasses needed protections from ransomware, spyware, credential theft, and more. Attacks continue to get all the more sophisticated at the same time that companies are seeing an explosion in mobile and IoT endpoints.

According to a report by RiskIQ, internet-connected endpoints receive 1.5 attacks every single minute. Without a robust strategy, businesses in Central Florida can end up suffering network hacks and data breaches.

The complicated nature of network security has led to a need for more intelligent protection tactics, such as the use of behavior monitoring, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Another tactic used by firewalls to improve security and identify potentially dangerous traffic is called geofencing.

What is Geofencing?

Geofencing is a firewall feature that identifies the geographic region where traffic originates. It does this by looking at the IP address of incoming traffic or network requests, each of which is tied to a physical location.

If you run a U.S. business and wanted to block any network traffic from China, for example, geofencing would allow you to create a firewall policy to do this.

But geofencing goes beyond just blocking traffic and it can be used for other security policies as well. For example, you could set up a geofencing policy that triggered if anyone was trying to log in to your server from outside your state, causing them be given a set of challenge questions to authenticate identity.

What Are the Advantages of Using Geofencing?

Using a firewall with the capability to geofence traffic can improve your company’s cybersecurity framework in several ways.

Improves Your Network Security Against Attacks

The ability to block unwanted traffic based upon the region that it’s coming from can help you prevent massive Denial-of-Service (DoS) or bot attacks. These are often unleashed from countries outside the U.S. and can cause your network to go offline even if nothing is breached, simply because the system can’t keep up with all the requests.

You’re also protected from data breaches that may come from hackers in other countries, and which can often happen overnight, when no one is “watching the shop” so to speak.

When you use geofencing, you’re putting in place a blanket coverage that can protect your network and data from multiple external attacks.

Say that you had several bots attacking from Eastern Europe, China, and South Asia. Rather than your firewall having to identify and combat each attack individually, with geofencing in place, you could have security policies that would simply block the attacks from those geographical areas, no matter how many individual IP addresses they may include.

Reduce Unwanted Traffic

If you have a local contracting business that does not do business outside your area, you could reduce unwanted traffic from other areas that may be taking up bandwidth and causing server response slow downs if you’re hosting your own website on an on-premises server.

You also have the ability to filter different geographical areas if you don’t want to completely block them but do want to limit their bandwidth usage.

In this way, geofencing gives you more control of your resources and how they’re allocated according to region.

Improve Credential Security

77% of cloud data breaches involve compromised login credentials. Once a user password is breached, it can end up being sold on the Dark Web and used by hackers from anywhere around the globe.

You can increase the security of your employee logins by implementing geofencing in your sign-on policies.

For example, you could block remote sign-ins to your network from different countries or if the user is simply outside the U.S. You could also add additional challenge questions or implement a limitation on access privileges based upon where someone was located when trying to access your network through a user account.

Better Handle Traffic from Different Regions

When you have the ability to easily track and control access from geographical regions to your network, you can personalize content or policies based upon where a user is when accessing your data.

This could include the ability to serve up different options on your server, depending upon a person’s location. It can also help you understand where most of your network traffic originates and connect that to other facets of your business, like sales and marketing.

Geofencing gives you vital insight that can help you better manage network traffic to make your business more efficient and secure.

Learn How to Add Geofencing Capabilities to Your Network

C Solutions offers multiple network security solutions that can help you better protect your network and endpoints. Gain more control and make network traffic handling more efficient!

Schedule a free consultation today! Call 407-536-8381 or reach us online.