There are lots of firewalls on the market, and choosing the right one for a customer is much harder than most people think, because it s a balancing act between requirements, convenience, and cost. Usually the latter is the overwhelming concern for companies, even at the expense of the other two considerations. So, to give you an idea of the firewall products on the market and their strengths and weaknesses, here s a rundown of those products. Keep in mind this is not a rigorous survey!

Probably the most popular firewall among UNIX users is Check Point Software s Firewall-1, a version of which is distributed by SunSoft for its workstations and servers. Firewall-1 uses a different approach to firewalls developed by Check Point (http://www.checkpoint.com) that provides a very high level of protection for machines inside the network. All packets entering the firewall are inspected and screened. The system can learn about new protocols and application packets once installed, which makes Firewall-1 flexible for the future. As a full-featured firewall, Firewall-1 is a superb product with almost no impact on the host server. Because the firewall software is part of the operating system kernel, it is nearly impossible to hack, and the system is fast. Administration requires practice, and the software is not cheap, but Firewall-1 has got to be the dominant firewall because of its strengths, not a savvy marketing campaign.

CyberGuard s CyberGuard (http://www.cyberguard.com) remains a favorite because of its ease of installation, light load on a UNIX or a Windows NT...