enterprise

This suite of programs is designed to control access to the internet and keep the enemy at bay. It integrates with many third-party defense applications to offer a war room in a browser from which the state of the defenses can be examined, as well as dictating how the various units work together to shield the internal network.

Fortinet's FortiGate 5020 is built using a powerful chassis containing dual, hot-swappable power supplies as standard, building in redundancy. The chassis can also house two 5001 blades, each of which comes with four copper Gigabit Ethernet ports and four small, form-factor pluggable (SFP) ports.

Symantec's Gateway Security 5440 fits in the middle of its 5400 series range. It comes with six Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, although you can also buy the 5441, with four fiber and two copper interfaces instead.

Microsoft's Internet Security & Acceleration (ISA) Server 2004, is the company's application for turning a Windows 2000 or 2003 server into an enterprise firewall. Installation was painless on our test Windows 2003 server.

The Nokia-Check Point partnership has been a successful one, combining Nokia's excellent hardware implementation with Check Point's proven security technology, as we can see with the IP380. Aimed at the small enterprise or branch office, the IP380 comes with a cryptographic accelerator, capable of 130Mbps of 3DES VPN traffic and four Fast Ethernet ports. With two spare slots in the 1U chassis, you can upgrade network capability at a later date.

Nortel's whole approach to security is different to the other manufacturers on test, as this bundle incorporates two products: the 6600 Accelerator and the Director 5024 firewall.

Better known for its smaller appliances, SonicWall has pushed into the enterprise market with its Pro 5060f. Running SonicOS Enhanced 3.1, the 1U appliance houses a 2.4GHz Intel Xeon processor, 512MB of RAM and six Gigabit Ethernet interfaces. The 'f' in our model signifies that two of these ports are multimode fiber, but you can buy a 5060 with six copper ports.

CyberGuard's TSP3600 is a beast of a firewall. A case 5U high houses a RAID array for data protection, 13 Gigabit Ethernet ports and one Fast Ethernet (up to a maximum of 30 ports) – more than enough ports to cope with very large networks.

Ecora Enterprise Auditor 3.5 is a comprehensive package tailored to fit into most contemporary IT environments.

Auditing software requirements will naturally vary between organizations. In many cases, a relatively straightforward approach will be all that is necessary. But sometimes you might want a higher level of analysis and control.

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).

AirDefense Enterprise is one of those wireless-security products that integrates into the enterprise as an integral part of the overall network management scheme.

The emerging spyware threat is spawning a horde of anti-spyware products. Some have been around for a while, such as the excellent AdAware and Spybot – Search and Destroy.

This might appear to be a slightly unusual product to include in this group test, but it qualifies as a potential biometric due to the use of signature verification, or fingerprints where applicable.