Well, Antivirus and Firewalls are both designed to keep your system safe but these two are fundamentally different and complementary type of security applications. They are both important and help in keeping the system/network safe from cyber-attacks.
Antivirus
Antivirus is a software program which will search/scan and find program/files/codes etc that might compromise your computer system and infect files. Viruses usually exploit a vulnerability in the system to infect it. Antivirus would scan for rootkits/trojans or other types of malware. These harmful files are either already running on your system or will execute soon.
Antivirus also looks for potentially harmful files that might have been downloaded from internet while surfing. Hence the basic aim of antivirus is to keep system virus free. The important factor to note here is antivirus needs to be update regular to have all the malicious codes signature. A same family virus can have different strands which might affect the system. Antivirus is working at the file level, it can be understood as an afterward security approach.
Firewall
Firewall software is a software which controls the incoming and outgoing network traffic determining whether or not to pass it. That is, it is the security layer between internet and your computer. These include Network layer or packets filter, Application-layer, proxies and network address translation. Firewalls analyze the number of data packets that is sent, it is also known as a “packet filter”.
It can be a hardware or a software based network security system. Hardware firewalls are providing much higher security and come with in-built unit of router.
Why do we need a firewall?
Internet connection leaves your system vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Hackers can access your financial information, identity to plant malicious code across other system maligning your reputation or even destroy your system and files. Firewalls provide security over a number of online threats such as session hijacking, remote login, cookie stealing, DOS & DDOS attacks, remote login etc.
While Antivirus software is important as it protects the system from malwares and other malicious codes, internet security is highly important specially for companies running on a network system. The latest threat of ransomware has made it even more important to place high caliber firewalls to keep the digital data protected.
Logix Infosecurity provides latest firewall security systems, they protect the company’s network 24*7 against cyber-attacks and other different types of hacking. The DLP tools provided by Logix are also latest security tools being used by major companies all across the globe.