Choosing a suitable Firewall

[Latvian]

Hello everyone,

I have a small LAN in a medical office. The network consists of 3 pc's, 3 IP phones and a printer. The pc's are connected wirelessly using a modem/router from the ISP and the IP phones are connected through Ethernet. The staff of the medical office is having everything saved online (medical records, billing, payment info and so on). Do I need to include a hardware Firewall in my setup or is the software (Kaspersky Internet Security) is enough? If I need a hardware firewall, what and how should I chose one that fits such a network?

Thank in advance.

 

[jdabbs]

Has your office migrated to the new EHR platform yet? Your vendor may require hardware to perform VPN tunneling. A Cisco ASA5505 would handle both VPN and firewall duty admirably, but I wouldn't make any purchases until I knew the vendor's plans.

 

[Latvian]

Has your office migrated to the new EHR platform yet? Your vendor may require hardware to perform VPN tunneling. A Cisco ASA5505 would handle both VPN and firewall duty admirably, but I wouldn't make any purchases until I knew the vendor's plans.

I think it's the new EHR platform. It's a web-based and the vendor called Practical Fusion. I have contacted them and they said that there is no need to use a firewall since their service is web-based and that Firewalls should be used on the Network level which brings back my original question: any ideas if a firewall needed in my previously mentioned set-up?

Thanks

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I would still want the network protected by a UTM appliance. IMO...plain NAT routers are extinct...or should be, for business networks.

UTM appliances (Unified Threat Management) utilized additional antivirus and antimwalware engineS (yes that's plural) to scan all traffic going in and out and other threat control.

Untangle, Astaro, Kerio, Fortigate, Sonicwall, just a few brands that have UTM appliances.

While your data is stored out in the cloud somewhere...logins are still done at the desktop level.