Hello thread. A couple of articles to follow. Current price action is critical - will it break the $42 top-level resistance? I don't think it will - more likely is a short fall to upper thirties again. We'll see.
-Jay
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March 23, 1998, TechWeb News
The Virtues Of Firewalls
By Salvatore Salamone
You've got to keep evolving if you are going to keep pace with the times.
At least, that's what firewall vendors are finding.
The firewall has traditionally been a security device used to guard a corporate
network-denying access to undesirables. But that role is shifting somewhat in many
corporations.
The firewall "is the most logical place in our network to implement VPN technology,"
said Arthur Kalman, a network administrator for Ballinger Manufacturing Corp., a metal
fabrication company with four plants in the southwestern United States.
Like Kalman, many IT managers still regard the firewall as the bastion of security. But
they also want to tap some key firewall features for their virtual private networking
efforts.
To that end, many firewall vendors, including Digital Equipment, Lucent Technologies
Inc., Raptor Systems Inc. (a division of Axent Technologies Inc.) and WatchGuard
Technologies Inc. are using the sophisticated traffic-filtering capabilities of their
firewalls to let people access the corporate network on a selective basis. In other words,
they're letting authorized users tunnel through to the network behind the firewall.
At the same time, Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. and IBM are taking things a
step further by positioning the firewall as a type of VPN/bandwidth management tool.
"The firewall was viewed as a way to keep the bad guys out," said Phyllis Byrne, vice
president of IBM's distributed systems services software solutions division. "Today,
the firewall has become more a perimeter manager rather than serving as just a blocking
function. There's more selectivity on who can pass through and more of a class of
service notion."
Byrne noted that "in the VPN context, integrating class of service functionality or
priority of some sort is something that normally would not have been thought of as a
firewall function."
But such conceptions about firewalls are changing. For instance, IBM will be doing
more to tightly integrate the firewall with a corporation's existing access control
systems. "We will be putting our directory inside our firewall as it matures into this
perimeter management vehicle," said Byrne.
Consolidate, Integrate
Other firewall vendors are taking similar approaches. For instance, traffic control and
integrated management were prominent in Check Point's VPN road map, which the
company articulated last month.
Check Point said its goals were to offer quality of service and performance
predictability to IT managers. To do this, the company will in the second half of this
year integrate the features of two of its existing products-FloodGate-1, a bandwidth
management application, and ConnectControl, a server load-balancing application-into
its VPN offerings.
Like IBM, Check Point wants to consolidate management of the firewall, VPN and
network. To that end, the company will move toward a policy-based management
approach in which an IT manager can develop one set of access criteria for the
enterprise network and VPN.
Other firewall vendors see VPN features as a natural extension of their products. For
instance, last week Lucent announced it was adding VPN support and management
reporting capabilities to its Managed Firewall 2.0.
Digital offers a VPN package that combines, as an add-on, its High Availability Tunnel
System with its AltaVista Firewall System.
WatchGuard offers a VPN as a standard feature within its Firebox firewall. WatchGuard
supports both remote user access via a VPN and branch-office connectivity through a
VPN.
And last December Raptor introduced Eagle 5.0, the company's high-end firewall with
an integrated VPN.
Tom Smith contributed to this story.
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc. |
