Firewalls might have started as obscure pieces of software that you installed to cope with a largely theoretical threat, but they are now an integral and essential part of the networking landscape. We have looked at a range of appliances, from the high end of the enterprise market to those for companies in the small to medium enterprise (SME) market, and at a number of software solutions. There is still some concern about the security of "software only" firewalls and their underlying operating system. Some products solve this problem simply by reformatting the system's hard drive and installing their own "hardened" operating system as well as the firewall software.
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