You can see firewall as guards with the primary goal of protecting a server against intruders.

Here at Ibmi Media, we regularly help our Customers to set up firewall on their Servers as part of our Server Management Services.

In this context, we shall learn more about Firewall and how it works.

More about Firewall?

Basically, firewall is designed to limit traffic to certain services with a system. It serves as a barrier to prevent different attacks.

In reality, a security strategy is beneficial to both hardware, and software firewalls. That said, understanding them based on a comparative approach definitely helps framing sound firewall policies.

Now we will look into Hardware and Software firewall implementation briefly.

What is Hardware Firewalls?

Hardware firewalls are basically stand alone hardware devices, meant to filter traffic according to the configured rules. They can be easily configured and makes system operation more efficient. They are easily deploy-able and works with all distributions, OS and networks. Such infrastructures usually have incoming and outgoing ports for administering various network typologies.

Hardware firewalls work on the concept of packet filtering. This means that it reads the header of each packet, to determine the source and destination of a packet(As well as ports). Based on pre-configured rules in the firewall, it either lets the packets through, or stops them.

Even though the configuration of the device is more or less user friendly, setting up a sound firewall policy requires some sort of expertise in server, network security and the way it is designed.

More about Software Firewalls

Software firewall allows for a greater level of flexibility in its configuration. Basically,  the firewall differs in different OS and this gives more features using the inherent features of the OS in this case. A well configured firewall usually exhibits vulnerability checks and Security to safeguard the system.

While we discuss the good side of Firewall, it is important to consider the use of a software firewall as it works on a specific host/computer. Therefore, its Configuration gives protection for a network.


Using a sophisticated hardware firewall does not mean that the system is risks proof but it helps to build a strong security strategy that stands the protect the system from attacks.

Need to setup Firewall on your Server or Operating System? We are available to help you today.