The Government Has Gotten Serious About Security.

Many people in the health care industry are familiar with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and that it dictates very strict data security measures for all businesses that handle healthcare information, and very stiff civil and criminal penalties for failing to protect this data. However, many business owners, operators and executives in other industries are not familiar with the abundant amount of federal and state legislation that dictates data protection measures for handling other types of data, such as customer credit card information. Simply stated, if your company is connected to the Internet or if your business is accepting transactions and other types of information online, your executives and board of directors can be held civilly and criminally liable for ensuring that data is protected - regardless of business size or location. Are you certain that your security measures are compliant?

The following is a sample list of general or industry-specific data security legislation that is probably relevant to your business:

Healthcare (HIPAA): http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa
Energy (NERC): http://www.nerc.com
General (SB1386): http://info.sen.ca.gov/pub/01-02/bill/sen/sb_1351-1400/sb_1386_bill_20020926_chaptered.html
General (Graham-Leach-Bliley Act): http://www.senate.gov/~banking/conf/
General (Sarbanes-Oxley Act): http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2003/0,4814,87704,00.html
ITS Team, Inc. We Can Help.

ITS Team, Inc. is a leader in network security providing network appliance security solutions to small- and medium-size businesses. ITS Team, Inc. can work with you to design a solution that will help you adhere to the new world of data security compliance.

To have a ITS Team, Inc. Customer Service Representative contact you about your security options, please complete this brief form.

Firewall Appliances

Firewall Technology

Not All Firewalls Are Created Equal:
A firewall is your first line of defense against Internet security threats. It acts as the gatekeeper to keep hackers on the Internet from accessing data on your network. However, all firewalls are not the same. The key differences in firewalls are the amount and quality of information used to make decisions. The more information collected, the more security the firewall delivers.

Packet Filtering Firewalls

A packet filtering firewall simply examines the packet header and decides whether or not to let the packet proceed. Decisions are made in accordance with a set of rules or filters. The inability of packet filtering to dig deeper into the packet exposes your network to Denial of Service (DoS), IP Spoofing, and a host of prevalent Internet attacks. Most broadband routers include packet filtering firewalls along with IP networking features like NAT (Network Address Translation), and DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) to share broadband Internet connections. While these functions make it easy to connect a network to the Internet, they do little to improve the security of the connection since hackers can easily bypass NAT to gain access to your network.

Stateful Packet Inspection Firewalls

A stateful packet inspection firewall intercepts packets until it has enough information to make a determination as to the state of the attempted connection before passing judgment. By maintaining a table of current connections and their most recent events, these firewalls are able to spot abnormal sequences inherent in hacker attacks. Stateful packet inspection is the most trusted firewall technology and is widely used in enterprise-class firewalls.
At ITS Team, Inc. we have extensive experience with the following Firewall Appliance hardware.

Checkpoint          Cisco Pix         Netscreen          SonicWall          WatchGuard