Markham Stouffville Small Business Network Security
For alot of small businesses it seems reasonable to purchase an off the shelf router for your office. This may be feasable when you have 2 or 3 computers and a networked printer. Add in a few more computers; some personal cell phones or tablets. Add some web services for accounting or word processing. Add some IP cameras and now you got alot of traffic. Off the shelf routers were not intended to have this much load. The usually have only 32mb or 64mb of ramm. The way routers work; once all the ramm is used up it will not allow any new connections or even to have the DHCP give you an IP address.
What we do for Small Business Networks; (and for households that have alot of gatgets) we install an open source IDS/IPS Router/Firewaill. (Intrusion Detection Software / Intrusion Prevention Software). For the most clients we do not enable more of the advanced functions like packet logging and VPN; but we can if it would benifit the client. Because this unit is installed on a PC (and it will work fine on your old pentium 2 with windows xp on it) and PC's built in the last 20 years have gigs of ramm and not mega bytes. It alone can handle 10's of computers, multiple printers, scanners and cameras.
Using a community maintained open source solution is alot more secure then your off the shelf router. Security wise; off the shelf routers are not always updated to defend against the latest security threats. And even if new updates are available you need to flash the router which sometimes can make it unusable. With our solution all that needs to be done is to log into the web GUI and click update. This can even be done remotely by us.
Features available:
- Network is robust and can accomodate many devices.
- Easily updated to combat the latest malware threat (eg Spectre and Meltdown).
- Guest WiFi networks can be seperate from the business network and throttled, have a password which changes daily and can be set ot be available only certain times of the day.
- Create your own VPN, or tunnel thru another VPN
- Log network activity onsite or offsite
