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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.

The LANDesk Management Suite is much more than just an auditing tool. It is a comprehensive group of tools for generally managing a corporate network which might include large numbers of clients.

LANsurveyor 9 is a subtly different program from others tested here. At its heart is a graphical mapping capability that allows you to create "maps" of your network to various levels of detail. These maps might be used solely within the program, or be exported in a variety of formats, including Microsoft Visio, so you can edit them as appropriate to your organizational requirements.

We evaluated a previous version of PC-Duo and were generally impressed with its intuitive interface and no-nonsense functions. We are pleased to report that the previous strengths – an attractive and intuitive interface – remain. The functionality has also been well considered and will be truly useful in a broad range of operational scenarios.

SecurityExpressions is a comprehensive audit and compliance software tool which is easy to deploy and usable in most computing environments. It can audit systems either with or without agents deployed on the target machines.

Track-It comes in three flavors, with varying levels of sophistication: Standard, Professional and Enterprise.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.