Before You Renew your Firewall, Check What the Business Now Needs

The firewall renewal costs a known amount.

The cost of getting the decision wrong is harder to see.

It could appear as slow access to critical applications, disruption during a busy trading period or an IT team spending hours diagnosing recurring faults.

For an organisation with 250–1,000 employees, those problems can reach well beyond the service desk. They affect the people taking orders, serving customers, processing payments and keeping operations moving.

Before approving the next renewal, establish whether the network still supports the business it has become.

Put a business cost against disruption

In a 2026 survey commissioned by LightSpeed Networks, 36% of 401 UK business connectivity decision-makers estimated that their organisation’s last significant connectivity fault cost at least £5,000. 17% estimated £25,000 or more. The research covered a broader UK business sample, rather than a dedicated mid-market group.

Those figures cover connectivity faults generally. They do not establish that firewalls caused the disruption or that replacing one would have prevented it.

They do provide useful context for a renewal discussion: the subscription price is only one part of the financial decision.

The more relevant calculation is what interrupted access would cost your organisation.

Which teams would stop working? Which customer commitments would be affected? How quickly would delayed transactions become lost revenue?

Those answers help establish where resilience investment is justified.

Review the service people depend on

Consider a hypothetical business with 600 employees across its head office, branches and a distribution site.

Since its firewall was installed, it has moved its order-processing system to the cloud, introduced internet-based telephony and added warehouse devices.

The equipment still works. The consequences of losing access have changed considerably.

A connection that once supported email and browsing now underpins order fulfilment and customer service.

That changes the requirements for capacity, failover, support and recovery.

A renewal review should capture those changes before they become an incident.

Find the constraint before buying more capacity

When applications slow down, upgrading the internet connection can feel like an obvious response.

But the constraint could sit in wireless coverage, a congested switch uplink, firewall inspection capacity or the application itself.

Replacing the wrong component leaves the complaint unresolved.

Review the path from the user to the application. Measure performance during busy periods, with the security services the organisation needs enabled.

For wireless, examine coverage, device density and competing demand. For switches, check uplink capacity, power requirements and critical dependencies. For firewalls, assess inspected throughput, connection demand and the policies being applied.

This gives the IT team evidence to distinguish a hardware limitation from a configuration or design problem.

It also creates a clearer investment proposal.

Test what happens when something fails

The LightSpeed survey also found that 68% of respondents reported staff being unable to work following connectivity disruption, while 60% reported disruption to customer service.

That is why resilience needs to be tested against business operations.

A backup connection may activate successfully but struggle to support normal application demand. A second firewall may leave a shared switch or power supply as a single point of failure.

During a controlled test, establish which services remain available, how performance changes and how long recovery takes.

Include the return to normal operation. Switching back can introduce its own disruption if the process has never been rehearsed.

The result should be a documented understanding of what the business can continue doing during a failure.

Include the cost of managing complexity

The financial impact also includes the work required to keep the network running.

Research commissioned by Zen Internet in 2026 found that 78% of 500 UK senior technology decision-makers said complexity involving multiple vendors, platforms and contracts was significantly or extremely slowing change. Its sample covered mid-market organisations and above, using a broader definition than 250–1,000 employees.

For a renewal review, that raises practical questions.

How long does it take to trace a fault across sites? Can the team identify inconsistent configurations? Are responsibilities clear when the connectivity provider, firewall supplier and internal support team are all involved?

Evaluate management tools and support arrangements against those tasks.

A useful improvement might reduce diagnosis time, simplify a recurring change or give the team a consistent view across locations. Define that benefit before adding another platform.

Give leadership a decision they can assess

A stronger business case connects each proposed investment to an observed limitation.

Show what is happening, which business service it affects and what evidence supports the recommendation. Explain the implementation impact and the consequences of deferring it.

That assessment may support renewing the existing firewall. It may justify a replacement, a switching upgrade, better wireless coverage or a change to the resilience design.

At Robinscroft, we help organisations assess firewalls, switching, wireless and connectivity together, so investment addresses the problems that matter to the business.

Before the next renewal, choose one critical service and establish what it depends on, where it is constrained and what happens when a component fails.

That gives leadership a concrete basis for deciding what needs to change.