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Firewalls

Have you been beating the security drum to senior management for years and getting a less-than-enthusiastic response? Do end users see your measures to protect the network as annoyances? Listen up: The Nimda worm and recent terrorist attacks have opened everyone's eyes. You've known for years that the threats are real. Now, they it know too. Security has moved to the forefront in many facets of our lives, and the time has come to step up and take a leadership role in protecting your organization and its assets.

Meta Group says 2002 will be the year that IT departments can raise their value to their organizations by designing and implementing comprehensive, tailored security plans. And firewalls are clearly one of the foundations of any such plan. "I have seen companies that have put up a firewall, then put a proxy server in front of it and automatically forwarded everything that hits the proxy server through the firewall into servers on the corporate network," Meta analyst David Thompson says. "I have also seen companies that have carefully set up multiple firewalls with demilitarized zones between them, then built back-end connections between servers that circumvent those firewalls." We're sure you have your own horror stories.

In this issue, we present our most comprehensive firewall testing and analysis to date. As we did in our recent IDS (intrusion-detection system) review, we've covered all the bases (see "To Catch a Thief"). Whether you're looking for a high-availability corporate firewall, a centrally managed SOHO firewall, a collocated firewall or a desktop firewall, you'll find what you need here. Each firewall has its strengths and weaknesses, and we graded it accordingly. In fact, no single vendor's products won the Editor's Choice award in all of our reviews -- each review has a winner based on our evaluation. This confirms that the requirements of the application should drive the technology purchasing decision -- it's not the other way around.