One of the most effective ways to protect your business from cyber-attacks is to use a next generation firewall suite, but be careful, not all firewalls are equal. Businesses may find themselves vulnerable to online threats where they have opted for older or cheaper firewalling technologies that cannot perform SSL encryption and decryption between the computers in their office and the public server they are connecting to, a function especially important today as nearly 90% of all internet traffic today is encrypted.  

Ultimately if your firewall can’t ‘see’ your online traffic properly your business is at greater risk of a cyber-attack. Additionally, your firewall should support an arsenal of other security technologies including Deep Packet Inspection, Intrusion Prevention, Identity Provider Security, Web Filtering, Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware, for your best chance of avoiding an online attack.  

Sharp offers New Zealand businesses a Unified Threat Management suite that encompasses the latest in content security tools that drastically reduce your exposure to online cyber-attacks.  

A DDoS attack is a type of cyber-attack in which an attacker attempts to overload a target system with fake requests, making it unavailable to legitimate users. The attacker typically uses a botnet, or network of infected computers, to generate the high volume of requests. DDoS attacks can be very disruptive and cause significant financial losses for businesses. They can also be used as a form of political protest or as a tool to disable critical infrastructure. 

While DDoS attackers typically target larger public facing services, such as websites, there can be significant knock-on effects to other businesses if services they rely on have been affected during the attack. 

Sharp business WAN customers benefit from a complimentary DDoS mitigation and prevention technology that analyses all international traffic at our Australian and US handovers, before it enters the New Zealand market. This is referred to as “clean” internet.  

Building and operating a high-performance network requires stringent attention to detail, path diversity, power integrity and equipment resilience. Consideration should be made of what level of redundancy is important to your business. From a local power cut, fibre outage, faulty router or network switch, or to a large upstream service provider event that could affect your entire business, what level of disruption can your business tolerate?  

Sharp offers several layers of network resilience to its business customers, including local site redundancy via a private 4G network (built exclusively for Sharp) to upstream path diversity via a comprehensive national and international multi-carrier network designed to deliver maximum network uptime.