For years, the firewall was seen purely as a defensive tool—an all-in-one solution with antivirus, web filtering, and intrusion protection. Nowadays, they can potentially serve a much greater purpose beyond simple network security. When leveraged right, you can use the immense amount of data firewalls track to identify bottlenecks, optimize workflows, and make smarter infrastructure investments.

Eliminate Redundant Software Costs

Your firewall can see every single application that tries to communicate with the outside world, allowing it to function as a “truth layer” that shows which tools your team is using and which ones they’re passing up.

This is especially helpful for identifying shadow IT, where employees use their own unapproved solutions that may be insecure. Monitoring software also allows you to see where you can consolidate software licenses and identify redundant solutions that perform the same function. Furthermore, keeping your finger on the pulse in this way gives you the opportunity to see which tools might benefit from more training; if high-value solutions are seeing next to no traffic, it’s a surefire sign that people either don’t know how to use them or they don’t want to, both of which are problems that must be addressed.

Of course, the first step toward addressing these issues is to make them visible, which is what the firewall accomplishes.

Address Bandwidth Bottlenecks Before They Hit Your Bottom Line

Sudden drops in bandwidth can break important solutions like your VoIP or video conferencing tools, but what many businesses don’t know is that it’s often not the provider’s fault.

These glitches are often internal priority problems caused by too many solutions vying for the same bandwidth. A firewall can help you prioritize traffic so your voice and video calls are never dropped in favor of less important browsing. Your firewall can also help you root out data hogs, or specific devices and applications that are using excessive bandwidth, thereby slowing down the rest of your infrastructure.

When you know how much bandwidth you need (and for what), you can more easily scale, allowing you to transform insights from your firewall into business intelligence.

Track Workflow Velocity Through Traffic Patterns

The data your firewall captures can act as a pulse check for your company’s operational health.

Specifically, you can look at how and when traffic moves through your network to check on your team’s productivity and engagement. This helps to identify hours when your team is most active on core business applications, compare latency and usage patterns between in-office workers and remote employees, and check on the security protocols of the firewall itself. You can keep your security protocols in the comfort zone to ensure you’re not sacrificing security for speed (or vice versa).

Despite what it might feel like sometimes, security is absolutely not a sunk cost, and it can provide value well beyond keeping you safe when something goes wrong.

By leveraging the data inside your firewall, you can get a glimpse into how your business functions. These are valuable insights that will help your business grow fast.

Learn more about how you can outspeed other businesses in Maryland today by calling us at (410) 531-6727.