A business firewall when nobody is a security engineer

Two bad options, historically

A business with twenty people has usually had to choose between consumer equipment that does not attempt the job, and an enterprise appliance that assumes a team exists to configure, tune and watch it. The first is inadequate; the second becomes shelfware within a quarter.

The deciding property is not feature count. It is how much attention the thing needs to keep working.

What has to be true without supervision

• Threats blocked before they land. At the gateway, so it covers the devices that cannot run security software: the camera, the printer, the card terminal.
• Guests genuinely separated. A visitor should not share a network with the machine that holds your accounts.
• Management off the user network. Administration should not be reachable from the same place as everything else.
• Remote access without exposure. Working from elsewhere should not mean opening the office to the internet.

Continuity is a security property

For a business without IT staff, the most important question about a security device is what it does when it fails. A device that can take the business offline while protecting it has traded one risk for a worse one.

EWUS gateways fail open: if the software has a problem, the connection stays up. Two lines run together rather than one sitting idle as a line item. EWUS Secure is the module for this, and it is meant to be set up in an afternoon rather than run as a project.