# Firewall Best Practices for Securing Smart Healthcare Environment: A Review
## 7 Discussion and Recommendations  
In this paper, we provided a comprehensive classification of firewall types, best practices, and an update of firewall taxonomy for the cloud and of the most significant firewall vulnerabilities. Due to their ineffectiveness in securing networks and to high exposure to external attacks, packet-filtering firewalls are not generally recommended, and are not used in cloud firewalls. Stateful inspection firewalls are often implemented in modern security systems. It was also observed that a great variety of firewalls applied to traditional network systems are still valid for cloud environments, providing different levels of effectiveness, efficiency, and security, according to the way they operate within network systems. Vice versa, a new generation of firewalls, such as virtual firewalls, are essentially applied to virtual environments; they are still applicable to traditional networks. The virtual firewalls also provide a useful workaround for issues typically involving physical firewall devices, such as firewall rule anomalies. However, making perfect designs for virtual firewalls is still a challenging task for cloud environments due to the risks; cloud systems are exposed to design errors and weaknesses that are difficult to fix during the execution. Therefore, an interesting aspect involving cloud-based firewalls is to go beyond the perimeter and extend the role of the firewall as we usually think. Moreover, modern firewalls are stateful, providing an effective packet inspection, intelligently dropping all suspicious traffic. However, even the most powerful firewall needs to work with other networks, security components, and devices (for example Intrusion Detection System and Intrusion Prevention System). For instance, stateful inspection, proxy application, WAF firewalls, and other recent firewall types, can work in tandem with the most advanced hardware and software security devices, and are considered as best firewall practices. In recent times, smart healthcare monitoring services are increasingly leveraging due to offering benefits specifically under current circumstances and pandemics the world is facing. Moreover, smart healthcare environments play a crucial role in the timely delivery of healthcare services and advice to patients and to professionals. Moreover, data captured through embedded sensors and wearable devices can reveal critical conditions about the patients and communicate through the internet and cloud servers. Adversaries target the healthcare environments to gain financial benefits through obtaining the patient's data. Integration of the cloud with the healthcare environment requires special security provisions to protect not only the privacy, but understand the risks as well. Similarly, additional security measures and control need to be in place along with the firewall placement. Moreover, delivering end-to-end security requires preserving patient data and privacy through the implementation of proper firewall technology. Therefore, it is needed to ensure the proper security, privacy, and availability of smart healthcare systems. The emergence of healthcare-related cybertimes is a major concern to healthcare systems where data and security breaches cause not only financial issues, but negatively damage reputations and impact litigation [73]. Another important area of concern is the rise of the internet of medical things (IoMT), where a large number of devices are communicating with other devices to form a network and to share personal data; hence, protection of data and securing the devices is another dilemma. Another growing area of threat is the attack on wearable and implanted medical devices, where a single point of failure in a centralized network will adversely impact a patient's life. In our previous [74] work, we identified the challenges for implementing a combined healthcare based platform and proposed a blockchain based solution to address some of the challenges.