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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.

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).

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

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).

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.

Symantec's Gateway Security 5460 is the largest, and one of the most powerful, appliances that we have had on test. It has eight Gigabit Ethernet ports, which can be configured to segregate a network or for high availability. The firewall can also be configured to load balance between a cluster, improving performance provided you have the correct license.

ZyXEL's ZyWall 35 shows that, while small in dimensions, it is not small on features. The front panel of the appliance houses two WAN and four LAN Fast Ethernet ports, while the rear of the device has out-of-band management through it is console port and a PC Card slot, so you can add 802.11g WiFi (see company website for supported cards).

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We have looked at DESlock+ before, with its DESkey USB tokens and file encryption software. And while the previous version impressed us enough to win Best Buy in our Data Encryption test last year, it is safe to say that the product has been improved by leaps and bounds since then.

NMS for PC v2.8 is a file encryption system with some interesting bells and whistles. The software integrates into the Windows logon process, using logon to ensure that access to encrypted data is limited to authorized users.

Using zip archives to compress and transfer files has become such a standard part of everyday computing that the notion of using the same tools for security should come easily to most users.