Routers and Firewalls

Hello again folks! Happy new year and happy holidays to everyone! I hope everyone had a great holiday season. So I wanted to talk about routers and firewalls today.

You see one of the more common questions I get from customers is what is the difference? Well at it’s core, a router is a device that routes data from one network to another. Whereas a firewall is a device that provides security to your network. However most devices these days fall into both categories. Most firewalls are going to provide some sort of basic routing capability and most routers will provide basic firewall capabilities. So what to do?

Well the answer is: it depends. If you have fairly small business needs, either should be fine for you. But if you need high end security, a firewall is your best bet. If you need to do some high end routing such as BGP then you definitely want a dedicated router. And if you need both I would buy both a firewall and a router and dedicate them to their respective tasks.

-RP