Managed Firewall Service for UK Businesses

What does a managed firewall service actually include?

Five disciplines, applied continuously. Rule reviews: the rulebase is audited on a schedule against what the business actually uses, because firewalls rot by accumulation — every temporary exception that nobody removes widens the attack surface. Firmware and patch management: the firewall is itself software, and unpatched edge devices are one of the most actively exploited categories of kit on the internet; we test and apply vendor updates on a managed cycle. Configuration monitoring: device health and configuration state are watched continuously, and drift from the agreed baseline gets investigated. Change management: every rule change is requested, approved, documented and reversible. Reporting: you get the evidence — what changed, what was blocked, what was patched — in a form an auditor, insurer or Cyber Essentials assessor will accept.

Firewalls and Cyber Essentials

Firewalls are the first of the five technical control themes that Cyber Essentials verifies: every in-scope device protected by a correctly configured boundary or software firewall, default passwords changed, and management interfaces protected. It is also one of the easiest controls to fail through neglect rather than ignorance — the firewall was configured properly once, and then three years of undocumented changes happened. A managed firewall keeps the control permanently in the state the assessment expects, which is one less thing to remediate each renewal cycle.

Barracuda and Zyxel, matched to the business

AMVIA is a partner of both Barracuda and Zyxel. In broad terms we deploy Barracuda's security platform where businesses need deeper inspection, application control and integration with a wider security stack, and Zyxel's firewall range where the priority is dependable perimeter security and site-to-site VPN at SME-friendly cost. The honest answer on which fits you depends on sites, users, traffic and what the rest of your stack looks like — that's what the audit step is for, and we'll say plainly if your existing hardware is worth keeping.

What does a managed firewall cost?

AMVIA prices managed firewalls per site, banded by the size of the business behind them:

Where you land in the band depends on device class, whether hardware is supplied or taken over, and what the rulebase looks like when we inherit it — the exact figure comes with the quotation, not the invoice. The right-hand column is why it is worth quoting this before renewing with an enterprise-badged MSSP: the work is the same five disciplines either way.

Already have firewall hardware?

You don't need to buy new kit to get management. If your existing firewalls are supported models on current firmware — or can be brought up to it — we take them under management: credentials rotated, configuration backed up, rulebase reviewed against the baseline, and the same monitoring, patching and SLA applied as if we'd supplied them. Where hardware is end-of-life or unsupported, we'll tell you, because an unpatchable firewall fails the Cyber Essentials update-management control no matter who manages it.

The firewall is the start, not the whole job

A well-run firewall protects the perimeter; most incidents we see start inside it — a phished password, an unpatched laptop, a misconfigured Microsoft 365 tenant. That's why managed firewall customers usually broaden into managed IT support: one provider running the firewall, the endpoints, the patching and the helpdesk, under one SLA. If you're comparing that route, start with the managed IT hub — the firewall service slots into every tier.