Industry Standard Computers Home Page
Industry Standard Computers
St. Clairsville, Ohio
(740) 695-1520
30 Years In Business - 30 Years Experience with Computers - 25 Years with Networks & Security
The oldest system builder in the area, maybe in the state!
Best Labor Rate in the Area, $25 Shop, $40 Outside

Firewalls... more effective:

Third is the self updating firewalls.  These periodically update firewall rules like your virus program updates itself. Question here to ask is how often?  Some of the $300-1000, previously mentioned, update or can be manually updated about 1-3 times a year. Weekly is good here. If you want on the bleeding cutting edge add $200 plus markup to the price of your firewall per year. These self-updating firewalls are actually a linux operating system embedded into an appliance box. They offer little more than a single "set of rules."  All of this type has some kind of "yearly contract."  OR the yearly contract comes in the price upfront (when the warranty is up so is your updates). I have seen a few of these in the $2000 range for a 3 year warranty period. $700-$50,000 including contracts per year. Some "slime balls" call these "Managed Firewalls" and sell them to you with considerable markup.

Fourth and "growing like maggots on rotten meat" are the ones above but offer "adult content filtering" and maybe "squid." Some also have virus or spam protection too. This is the "In-thing" firewall.  So far I have been less then impressed with these "new comers" and "get on the bandwagon" companies. Even some of the virus companies (McAfee & Symantec) are riding on the bandwagon. And the newest paint on the band wagon is "Spyware Protection".  My Norton AV does a better job on spyware then these and it is 2003 version which doesn't even claim to remove spyware. This is important: these boxes are actually computers running a really scaled down gutted version of linux or a unix clone on what most people would call obsolete computer equipment. But because "popular opinion" is that "firewalls are a box" not a computer they look just like a router maybe a little bigger maybe not. If you buy one of these and your business depends on the internet, make sure you get really good same day 'replacement' or 'on-site service'. (They contain lots of proprietary parts.)  These too are sold as "Managed Firewalls."  Price here including the content filtering $2000 to $50,000.

Hardware firewalls offer very little protection from Adware or Spyware or viruses or non American porn at this level.

Fourth and thought to be relatively new to the industry, are similar to installing one of our "Firewall content Filtering Server." (The military has had these for years.) These are computers running linux with the "extras" taken out. These computers run most of the same software as the hardware firewalls but more efficiently; some add extra layers of security.  The difference here is: they have multiple sets of rules and other protections for the evils of the Internet. Since they are newer high speed computers they can run multiple software protections. If they break you fix them like any other computer.

Last year we searched for weeks to find what we felt safe using to protect Windows networks from the Internet. WE CAME UP EMPTY!  We tried a few times this year. We have inspected the band wagons... again "empty handed."

So if you don't like it fix it!  We purchased a software / configuration of the fourth variety that has been around for 5 years or so. (In this industry in firewall protection that is an ameba.) Then we took what was a fair firewall and a really good porn blocker with some spam protection and created our Firewall content Filtering Servers which offers the most comprehensive protection offered to date. It is now a high level firewall with really good content filtering including porn and things like gambling, virus infected, warez web site blocking; advertising & spyware /adware blocker; email scanner for viruses & spam and more here.
 

If you have Social Security Numbers stored on your computer or account numbers you are a high level target for all hackers!  It is doubtful you have enough protection unless you are an ISC customer.
 
 
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