TABLE OF CONTENTS To benefit fully from the opportunities offered by intranets, extranets, or the Internet without incurring undue risk, enterprises and organizations need strong security. It is a matter of urgency to prevent internal attacks, safeguard against break-ins, protect information systems, and preserve your enterprise s confidential information.
Global protection must include solutions dedicated to protect IT systems from unwanted intruders, granting specific individuals selective access to information resources and applications. Control of transactions, filtering of malicious content, and protection of confidentiality and integrity of communications must be ensured. Powerful tools to audit and manage security are also needed.
Firewall solutions are a key component of such a security policy. Protecting the point of interconnection between several networks, they allow filtering and control of network transactions. All traffic passing through firewall points (web accesses, electronic mail, application transactions) is precisely identified, checked, and allowed through or rejected, and eventually encrypted, depending on the rules and regulations set out in the security policy. Interposing security gateways between the outside world and the organization s inner networks, or between distinct subnetworks of the same organization, meets a fundamental network security need.
Using a gateway may dictate your network architecture. If you install a single gateway at the entrance of the network, it may act as a big filtering switch, forcing all intranet traffic to pass through it. However, it is not always possible to force the flows to pass through a unique point of control. Such an architecture is especially difficult ...
