Features

BorderWare's SteelGate SG-200 runs the company's own firewall, Firewall Server 7.1, running on the S-Core secure operating system. Rather than building an appliance from the ground up, the SG-200 is simply a PC (2GHz Intel Celeron Processor, 512MB RAM and a 40GB hard disk) in a rack-mountable chassis.

Network Engines, along with Celestix and its MSA4000, is the second company in this test to use Microsoft's Internet Security & Acceleration Server in an appliance (see Celestix review for more information).

WatchGuard's Firebox X range of appliances is designed to cope with the needs of enterprises of all sizes.

Symantec's Enterprise Firewall works with Windows 2000/2003 or Solaris 8/9. We installed it on our Windows Server 2003 machine with two network interfaces (a requirement of the software).

With individual PCs being a high risk factor in a network, a personal firewall is an important consideration, particularly when you have notebooks going in and out of the company. CrossTec's NetOp Desktop Firewall is one choice.

Kerio's stateful inspection WinRoute Firewall 6 operates on Windows 2000/XP/2003. After a painless and quick installation and reboot, it is ready to run.

Servers are often entry points to a network, particularly those that are internet visible. Kerio's ServerFirewall, designed for Microsoft operating systems, is designed to combat that by filtering traffic at the server.

For the price, D-Link squeezes a lot of features into its Linux-based DFL-1100 appliance, including a SafeNet PCI VPN accelerator card and four Fast Ethernet ports.

SmoothWall's Corporate Guardian 3 is one of the best value firewalls on the market. Just provide your own base PC, and the installation will take care of everything else.

Think of firewalls and Check Point is inevitably the first name that springs to mind, probably followed by thoughts of huge expense. This is not the case with Check Point Express, which brings high-end firewall technology to mid-sized businesses.

While most firewall appliances will run a custom operating system, or secured version of Linux, Celestix has decided to use Microsoft's Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) 2004 Server as the basis for its MSA4000 appliance. It runs Windows Server 2003 using 1GB of RAM and an 80GB hard disk. This, obviously, adds to the price of the appliance.

Protecting a single PC from harm usually involves installing a software firewall. However, on a server the overhead this causes can be too much, hence Innominate's mGuard PCI firewall, which has its own 266MHz processor and 32MB of RAM. We tested the professional version. There is also an enterprise version with higher specifications and a greatly improved management interface.

Astaro's Security Linux 5.1 takes the open source Linux software and hardens it, but also adds commercial software for a complete security package. It comes with six components: firewall, VPN, anti-virus (provided by Kaspersky), content filtering, anti-spam and intrusion prevention.

Computer Associates' Wireless Site Management 4.0 is a fully featured WLAN security and management suite. The software is mainly aimed at larger organizations, but it could be implemented for any company running a wireless network.

This is a flexible, robust, very scalable and multi-purpose wireless security solution. It provides rogue detection, troubleshooting, vulnerability assessment, intrusion detection, performance management and usage accounting. It has a standard Windows GUI with an open source Firebird database that includes a secure, password-protected interface, and can be easily configured both for a small business or a large enterprise.

Red-M's Red-Alert Pro is a wireless intrusion detection probe that senses 802.11 a, b, g, and even Bluetooth activity simultaneously. It logs security threats and feeds the details to a Red Detect server if run in managed mode, or stores it if run standalone. Red-Alert Pro keeps track of connections between known and unknown devices, making an alert whenever a new unknown device is present and informing you of which device(s) the unknown entity is communicating with. If run in standalone mode, the security logs can be accessed via a convenient and intuitive web interface. If run in managed mode, the Red Detect server handles the logs.

This complete software offering can be installed on almost any system in the organization to capture data from the system's internal wireless card. But check the compatibility chart before ordering, as only a specific set of wireless cards are supported.

BlueSecure from Bluesocket is a leader in its field. Why? Because while most wireless security products are not able to detect anyone walking up with a wireless capable computer and connecting to their network, BlueSecure detects computers, access points, or any other type of wireless connection device.