Turning down vendors who wanted us to review their firewalls was as unpleasant as cutting 14-year-old hopefuls from the freshman baseball team, but it was necessary. With more than 30 firewall vendors in our Buyer's Guide we couldn't possibly test a product from each.
In the past when we've been faced with too many vendors, we've based our lineup on market share. In the firewall field, market share hasn't changed much since our last Buyer's Guide (NW, June 1, 1998), but we've seen a host of new products we haven't had a chance to review. So this time we selected products whose firewall features we have never looked at or haven't reviewed in more than two years. We last tested the firewall capabilities of this year's Blue Ribbon Award winner, Axent Technologies' Raptor, in a firewall Buyer's Guide we published when the product was known as Eagle, before Axent acquired Raptor Systems (NW, Feb. 3, 1997). In the same review, we tested Trusted Information Systems' Gauntlet firewall, which is now owned by Network Associates. It's the first time in three years we've reviewed two veteran firewalls: IBM's eNetwork Firewall and Secure Computing's Sidewinder. Showing up for the first time in a Network World firewall review is Internet Dynamics' Conclave 2, which debuted in May. We reviewed an earlier release, Conclave 1.5, but we only tested the VPN features of Conclave in the previous review (NW, May 10). Another newcomer is Sonic Systems' SonicWall Pro, which was just released in April. We invited Cisco to submit its IOS Firewall, but the company declined our invitation. Computer Associates chose not to send us its latest product. Check Point Software, the market share leader, was eager to participate, but we've tested Check Point products twice in the past 13 months and in every firewall review since 1994. The company captured a Blue Ribbon in our review of combination firewall and VPN appliances (NW, April 19), and took home the Blue Ribbon in last year's firewall Buyer's Guide. Though it was tough to narrow the field, we think we ended up with a strong cross section of the enormous and competitive firewall market. RELATED LINKSReview: Firewalls
Raptor Firewall 6.0 takes top honors in our testing. Network World, 7/19/99.
Firewall RFP
See how vendors responded to our RFP.. Includes links to all the RFP responses.
Issues and trends
Where the firewall market is headed and what to look for. Network World, 7/19/99.
Interactive buyer's guide
Detailed specs on 52 models. Find the one that meets your criteria or compare two or more models on different specs.
Forum: Firewalls
Post your firewalls questions and discuss their use in this forum.
Firewalls to the rescue
Interviews with firewall users. Network World Fusion, 7/19/99.
