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First, allow us to congratulate Datakey on a most comprehensive and clearly written set of user guides. This is an important factor for many users and yet so often overlooked in contemporary products. For those as yet unfamiliar with smartcards and tokens, this can be very helpful and save them a lot of time as they progress along their own particular learning curve.

The Schlumberger DeXa.Badge is not so much a single product, more of a secure identity philosophy. Potential use of the associated chip cards could range from simple intranet/internet secure login, to a full blown certificate-based enterprise deployment for local and remote access, physical access control and other related applications.

ActivCard Gold provides the expected functionality for securing the desktop, remote network access and access to web services, via digital signatures stored upon a smartcard. Appropriate software utilities are provided to manage these functions. However, the ActivCard approach goes one stage further by adding biometrics technology to the mix.

Authenex Strong Authentication System (ASAS) is described as a network security application that provides strong (two-factor) authentication for remote, VPN and web access. This would appear to sum things up quite well and Authenex provides a variety of software tools to support this goal.

Another USB token approach, this time from Feitian Technologies, a company based in Beijing, China. The ePass2000 product comes attractively packaged with the software, printed user's guide, a USB token (in this case the ePass2000 with 1024-bit key functionality), overview brochures and even a mouse mat. This may give an impression of an off-the-shelf consumer oriented product, but the ePass offering is actually quite comprehensive.

The Aladdin eToken is a small, lightweight, attractive USB device, about the size of a physical key, which can generate and store user credentials such as private keys, passwords and digital certificates within its own protected chip environment.

RSA is usually associated with token solutions, providing dynamic one-time password facilities plugged into back end authentication servers like RSA's ACE/ Server. But there are times when a token is not ideal: you have lease costs to consider, the server-side requirements are relatively high and inexperienced users can find one-time passwords tricky to handle.

The SafeWord PremierAccess product immediately impresses as a solution that has been well considered from the outset. Developed around the dynamic password concept, it may nevertheless support smartcards and other tokens, and even biometrics. These methodologies may be mixed and matched depending upon the needs of the enterprise.

Entercept falls into the category of an intrusion prevention system (IPS). In common with traditional host-based IDS, Entercept resides on the host itself, but it works at a much lower level than a normal HIDS system.

This solution provides a network-based IDS, real-time session monitoring and internet/email content blocking. eTrust Intrusion Detection can be installed in standalone mode, or it can be distributed on separate machines. The intrusion detection program installs as a service under Windows NT/2000. As usual, the monitoring interface is a NIC in promiscuous mode, and therefore the presence of the IDS is concealed from the attacker.

This solution is supplied as software, desktop or rack-mounted. Each network sensor is a separate appliance, handing high-availability, high-security 10/100 or gigabit monitored segments.Running on a hardened OS, based on Red Hat Linux, in a small installation it can be managed using a web-based interface, software or optionally as an appliance.

NetScreen uses multi-method detection (MMD) in its IDS appliance, which also includes intrusion prevention options. MMD integrates stateful signature analysis with the detection of protocol anomalies, traffic anomalies, IP spoofing, layer 2 and SYN-flood attacks. Plus, it includes detection of 'backdoor' exploits and a network honeypot. The NetScreen IDP-100 is rated at 200Mbits/sec throughput, offering a choice of eight Fast Ethernet or two separate gigabit monitoring ports.

This is a network-based IDS, supplied as an appliance. There are four versions of the NID-300 series - the difference being in the number and speed of the Ethernet interfaces. The top-of-the-range model has two 10/100Mbit and two gigabit network interfaces. One of these interfaces is always reserved for management, but the remainder can be used for monitoring. In this way, a single NID-300 can monitor load-balanced or failover WAN connections. By separating the management and monitoring interfaces, NID-300 can operate in stealth mode, as the monitoring interface does not respond to any network traffic or requests from any service on the monitored network.

RealSecure 7.0 is the result of the integration between RealSecure and the BlackICE NIDS sensor technology. It runs on a dedicated machine and acts as a NIPS sensor to monitor a network segment, looking for intrusions or suspicious activity. If an intrusion is suspected, it can respond by recording details of the event. It can notify the network administrator, reconfigure the firewall, or terminate the event.

StealthWatch employs a completely different approach to traditional IDS, based on signature recognition. Instead of looking for signatures, it 'learns' what kind of activity is normal on your network and looks for abnormal events. Behavior-based IDS has some advantages over signature-based IDS, because less processing power is required and previously unknown attacks can be detected.

This software network-based IDS product requires a dedicated machine running Solaris 8 on either Sun SPARC or Intel hardware. The hardware specification depends on the amount of traffic to be monitored, and gigabit monitoring interfaces are supported. We were supplied with a pre-installed system running on a Dell PowerEdge rack-mounted server - however, customers would have to provide their own hardware; prices quoted are for software only.

In this Group Test we have looked at a number of solutions, all designed to manage your critical policy management and to ensure corporate policy is adhered to across even the largest networks.

This particular solution is for Windows 2000 users only; it sets, manages and backs up policies across your whole network without the need for agents. Designed specifically to replace the built-in utilities that are provided with Windows 2000 networks, it also allows the management of multiple domains in unison.

We've looked at PoliVec Builder in the past, a policy development tool from the same stable. Part of the PoliVec suite, PoliVec Enforcer integrates seamlessly with its policy development tool counterpart to keep the enterprise secure.

Therefore, policy can be locked down to stop system changes and policy non-compliance from weakening the protected network infrastructure. Extensive reporting enables a precise picture of your network and real-time monitoring ensures that notification of problems can be dealt with in a timely fashion.

Policy enforcement is only as good as your management system allows, so a serious vulnerability could go unnoticed without prior knowledge of the problem.

Security Expressions allows deployment using no-agent technology to ensure that, once installed on either Windows NT or 2000 systems, the administrator can add machines within a group, that are required to adhere to the policies that pertain to that group.

One of the biggest problems with internet security is that you can end up blocking sites which employees may have a perfectly valid reason for visiting - 'breast' blocking cancer sites, for example.