From the walled cities of medieval Europe to the forts of colonial America, our ancestors accomplished their objective: keep bad things out by limiting access to just one safe entry and exit point. Today we may not have to worry about roving hordes of vandals, or hungry bears or wolves, but for the electronic threats – the ones that can really damage a business network – it calls for a new breed of “fortress.”

That’s a useful way to think of Sprint Secure Web Protection, which we announced a couple of weeks ago. Its purpose is to keep the malicious, unwanted traffic from reaching enterprise networks. This not only protects the networks from harm, but takes the bandwidth the threats would have been consuming and frees it up for better business network performance.

These days, your Fort Enterprise needs to stand up to the whole gamut of Internet-borne maladies – spam, Trojans, spyware, adware, worms, viruses, phishing, you name it. Ideally, any solution that you choose should also handle URL and content filtering, as well as IM control, and enforce usage policies. These are all additional methods of making sure that bandwidth is not being used for non-business purposes and is instead optimized for business-critical communications.

You can select between premise-based or network-based Web Protection solutions. Typically, the premises-based option is the better choice for enterprises with a high concentration of users at a small number of sites. Alternatively, those organizations with a large number of sites would most likely find the network-based version the most cost-effective answer. Whichever Web Protection solution is best for your business – premise- or network-based – the solution should keep your network free of malicious traffic and working at peak efficiency.