Your business’s firewall is the layer of protection that keeps it safe from outside threats. A quality firewall blocks undesirable incoming traffic while still allowing your business to communicate externally. Does your small business really need a firewall? It’s critical to your overall security and helps keep your business running smoothly.

1. Avoid downtime with a quality firewall. Security threats are growing with every passing year, and many of them can bring your business’s productivity crashing to the ground. For a long time, users believed that Apple products were immune to the bulk of viruses. While it’s true that the same virus that can take down a PC won’t impact a Mac, it’s also true that savvy hackers are designing viruses that are specifically targeted toward Macs. A quality firewall can help prevent malicious traffic from impacting your machines and servers, keeping them running smoothly instead of leaving you with downtime that can have an intensely negative impact on your business.

2. Help plug security holes before hackers can reach them. You use a variety of programs every day that have security issues that can leave hackers with access to critical business data, including private customer information. A solid firewall provides an additional layer of protection before hackers can get to those programs, ensuring that your data is as secure as possible.

3. Stay in compliance with industry standards. If you deal with credit card data or collect private customer information, the government requires you to hold to specific security standards. Keeping up with those standards can be a challenge, but a managed firewall will ensure that you’re one step closer to being in compliance with your industry’s requirements. Being out of compliance can lead to fines, sever your relationships with various providers you use in your business, and ultimately destroy customer relationships–not to mention leaving you open to a wide range of outside threats.

4. Control outgoing traffic, too. When a malicious threat slips into your system, it may also be set with a line of code that will cause it to connect back with its creator, letting them know that they’ve successfully breached a system. You don’t want that traffic making it out of your network–and a quality firewall is designed to prevent that type of traffic, shutting it down before hackers can get back to your system. Your firewall is a layer of defense, not just from information that’s trying to break into your system, but from information that’s trying to break out of it–and its a layer of security that you don’t want to be without.

5. Authenticate connections to your system. You don’t want just anyone to have access to your small business network. Hackers often try to use existing connections by duplicating current packets and inserting their own data–and your firewall is the key to keeping them out. The better your firewall is constructed, the better the odds that you’ll be able to protect your business and keep it safe from those threats, allowing only connections that will be beneficial to your business and not those that could harm it.

When you purchase insurance–whether for yourself or for your business–you hope that you never have to use it. When you choose a firewall, you’re choosing a layer of insurance that will help protect you in the event of a malicious attack. You hope that you’ll never have to use it, but chances are, as malware threats rise across the board and an increasing number of companies are experiencing security breaches, at some point, you’re going to be grateful for that protection. Don’t let your “insurance” lapse! Instead, choose a high-quality firewall that will help protect your business from many of the threats on the market.