Firing Up Double Protection

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There are two types of protection: firewalls and encryption. A firewall controls who gets into and out of your network. An encryption program prevents unauthorized people from reading your e-mail or the files on your system. One or the other ? or both ? may be right for your company.

Firewalls act as gatekeepers between a company's internal network and the outside world. At minimum, firewalls examine the location from which data enter your system or the location to which data are going. Then, based on your instructions, they choose whether to allow the transfer of that information. For example, you might set up a firewall to accept files from your office in Hawaii but to reject any other files. The most thorough firewalls also examine the contents of files for viruses, monitor the use of the system, and keep logs so that you'll know if anyone tries to break in.

Secure as firewalls are, they can't repel intrusion 100% of the time. So if you're looking for the ultimate protection for your company secrets, consider encryption as a second line of defense. Think back to the breakfast cereal you ate as a kid. Sometimes there was a paragraph of gobbledygook on the back of the box that you could read only by covering it with a special piece of transparent colored plastic. That's essentially how encrypting a computer file works. One person creates a message and turns it into gibberish, using a special "key," or code. Only someone with the right decoding phrase (equivalent to the colored plastic) can read the message.

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