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ISA 2004 Firewall

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At the company that I work for, we currently don’t have a firewall in place. We are looking at purchasing one and I was wanting to get some input from you people. Would I be better off purchasing a hardware firewall or would ISA Server 2004 work just as good. Thanks.

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Purchase a hardware appliance. Software appliances will only be as secure as the OS they are riding on.

Reply To: ISA 2004 Firewall

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Asking whats better in securing networks with firewalls will get you 10 different answers from 10 different people. More a matter of budget, the experience of the people who will actually maintain it once its in place, and what you want to secure.

ISA 2004 is new. As such, its got the normal new problems and learning curves. I’ve run ISA 2000 for a couple of years now and setup ISA 2004 on a test network. As posted on some ISA boards, 2004 has a learning curve even for those of us who worked with ISA 2000. BUT, as a perimeter firewall, ISA 2004 is a pretty good deal. It’s like a Cisco Access router except configuration is by wizard so you don’t have to know command line stuff that you do with Cisco stuff.

You run ISA 2004 on its own box and depending upon your network topology you run 2,4, or more NICs to connect your internetwork to the Internet.

If your a small business with 1 internet connection and no remote sites to worry about, ISA 2004 is probably not for you. A firewall appliance would be a lot less hassle and costly to maintain.

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Build your own firewall with a linux box. That way you are more flexibel than you would be with a hardware firewall, which generally uses the same technology as a PC based linux version. If you build your own box you’ll be able to update faster.

I don’t have any experiance with isa server, so I can’t say anything about that, but somehow M$ and security, that just doesn’t go.

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