Organizational Network Monitoring and Security Evaluation Using Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW)

Abstract

The most Bangladeshi government and non-government scientific organizations have comprised both wired and wireless system network infrastructure. When such network infrastructure has been designed and developed at these organizations, ensuring network security has become a highly challenging issue. For this purpose, Next-Generation Hardware Firewall (NGFW) has been implemented by most scientific organizations. This hardware firewall is a very effective technology to perform network security. In this paper, we have chosen Atomic Energy Research Establishment (AERE), Savar under Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission (BAEC) as an experimental zone. To facilitate research and services, Internet-based network infrastructure has been established at AERE, BAEC. A Next-Generation CISCO-based network firewall has been integrated with the implementation of AERE network infrastructure to enhance and ensure network security. We have experimented and collected data from October 09, 2020 to October 09, 2021 at the network system of AERE. By collecting and evaluating these statistical data in terms of different network security parameters, we have investigated AERE’s network data like controlling ingress and egress traffic, monitoring traffic flow, malware threat analysis, web content and application filtering, URL filtering, decrypting traffic results, etc. In this paper, we have illustrated how network and application security is being achieved by the NGFW firewall and as a resulting factor, the summarization of scale up the network security for a scientific organization is enlightened.