IT Security

From small business networks to large medical centre WANs to legal firms, you can trust 3GL's staff and expertise to keep your network running smoothly - while keeping you safe from a growing number of viruses, device failures, and productivity disruption.

We believe in offering best-of-breed technology by matching the right product solution with client problems. 3GL's team offers experience and expertise for the design, implementation, and management of any size IT network.

Network Security Architecture

It's probably easiest if we break down the different fiewall devices available for an enterprise network architecture based on the following three zones:

1. Border network - This network faces directly onto the Internet via a router which might provide an initial layer of protection (usually in the form of basic network traffic filtering only). The router typically feeds incoming data through a perimeter firewall.
2. Perimeter network - This network (often called the DMZ or edge network) links incoming users to the Internet servers or other services. The Internet servers then link to the internal network via an internal firewall.
3. Internal Networks - The internal networks link all the internal servers, such as email and database.

All firewalls check incoming IP packets and blocks those it believes are intrusive. Some blocking can be done by recognizing by default that certain packets are illegal, others by configuring the firewall software to block them. A perimeter firewall may have a more restricted capability than an internal firewall - because incoming traffic is more limited since the data destination is the Web server or other internal services.

Many types of firewalls are available, differentiated by price, with the price mainly being comprised of features and bandwidth. Generally, the more expensive the firewall, the more power and features it has. Before recommending any firewall solutions, we determine what your requirements are, taking the following five factors into account:

• Budget - what manufacturer might offer the most value?
• Facilities - how much data and how many users need to be accommodated?
• Degree of availability - is there a requirement to filter data 7/24 with 99.9% uptime?
• Growth requirements - will the company and/or data usage change dramatically?
• Firewall features - for example, does a firewall need to perform application layer filtering?

Spam Filtering

Email spam filtering is the processing of all incoming e-mail according to specified criteria via a hardware device. The Barracuda Spam & Virus Firewall is an integrated hardware and software solution designed to protect your Exchange server from spam, virus, spoofing, phishing and spyware attacks. This firewall uses 12 comprehensive defense layers to provide industry-leading defense capabilities for any email server within large corporate or small business environments.

Increase your company productivity with more sophisticated spam protection, web filtering, and proxy solutions. We are able to provide various tools for comprehensive content filtering, with technology from the IT industry leaders in email and web security. We also offer email spam and virus protection standard with our Hosted Email packages.

IT Security Audits

Sometimes, you just need a starting point - because you just don't know what you don't know. We can help clear things up and give you the peace of mind that your network is secure and productivity is optimized. Here's an overview of the security audit service we offer:

• A complete evaluation of your current network security by analyzing known vulnerabilities - our security professionals will perform cutting-edge penetration testing on web applications and all network devices.
 
• Examine the effectiveness of existing and documented security policies - we'll leverage our expertise to evaluate current firewall rules and recommend strategies for better securing your perimeter.
 
• We will conduct network perimeter assessments and maintenance to existing hardware as needed - and we'll provide a maintenance schedule if one doesn't exist.
 
• We will provide detailed recommendations for improving and fixing the current IT network environment and an IT security roadmap with considerations for both software and hardware. The roadmap will not only include spam and virus protection, but will also consider the network bandwidth, Internet access, and user access requirements.