firewall

Blade has made quite a name for itself over the last year or so with the development of its Blade IDS Informer application, which monitors the performance of your intrusion detection system and ensures that it is running to the best of its abilities. The company has now extended this with the release of Firewall Informer, which performs a similar function for your corporate firewall.

Clavister is a fairly new name in the security market, but its high-end firewall appliances are impressive enough to ensure that will not be the case for long.

CyberGuard has a long and impressive track record in the firewall market, providing solutions from the desktop to those suitable for the high end, such as data centers. The SL2000 is positioned at the high end and, while certainly not the cheapest firewall in this Group Test, is worth every penny.

We looked at version 3.0 of this product in the virtual private network Group Test last year, and it is good to see it being evaluated as a firewall this time around. Astaro might not be a familiar name to most people, but it deserves to be if it continues to produce products such as this.

Swedish company Ingate may be a relatively new name in the firewall market, but its products have been getting an extremely positive reaction. The Ingate 1400 appliance is its solution for the medium-sized business; it is a black, 1U rack-mounted appliance, with four Ethernet ports, a COM port and a simple LED display.

Back in the world of software, we have Microsoft's entry in the firewall market. Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA Server) is a fully-featured firewall with a number of bells and whistles that add considerable functionality and security.

Old hand BorderWare has decided to focus on one particular area of network security - email. Whereas most companies are happy enough to bundle email in with the rest of its internet traffic and allow the firewall to handle all of it, BorderWare's MXtreme MX-200 appliance specifically focuses on the problems of email traffic.

SonicWALL is another well-known name in the firewall arena, offering a range of products suitable for anything from the home user to the high-end of the market.

Stonesoft produced its own firewall a few years ago and has shown that it really understands the high end of the market.

The EdgeForce firewall with Performance Module 1 enabled incorporates a flexible demilitarised zone (DMZ) via a third port. This gives the ability to host public servers (email, FTP and web) from behind the firewall, and with this feature, non-authenticated access to servers behind the firewall can be granted, yet the private network itself is still completely shielded from the internet.

Symantec is a very old name in the security business, but it is not going to rest on its laurels. Its software-based Enterprise Firewall with VPN has had yet another upgrade since the last time we looked at it, and it offers quite a few new features to what was already a very powerful application. The application is also available pre-loaded on one of Symantec's distinctive bright yellow appliances if you prefer.

At the small or home office end of the market we have the ZyWall 100 Internet Security Gateway. When we looked at the ZyWall 50 appliance in the VPN Group Test last year, we had a few concerns, such as build quality. This issue has clearly been addressed, since the ZyWall 100 is a robust yet compact device with a simple and attractive design.