Cisco Firewall for SOHO Users

Everybody knows that always-on broadband connections are especially susceptible to the prying eyes of those wearing black hats, especially if you have a permanent IP address. While it's fairly unlikely that someone's going to break into your system to steal pictures of your kid's birthday party, if you are running a business from home or a small office elsewhere, you're better off taking the extra precaution of protecting your data than facing the consequences. It's kind of like driving around without car insurance. If nothing bad happens, you might feel justified saving the money you would have spent on coverage. One little accident, however, and you're pretty much screwed. While there are cheaper options and more expensive options than this one, Cisco Systems is adapting its enterprise-class Cisco PIX Firewall technology for small office and telecommuter network environments. The new Cisco PIX 501 Firewall integrates many of the capabilities of its high-end PIX firewalls into a multi-purpose security appliance for securing remote broadband connections. Cisco's new firewall has security capabilities that include stateful inspection firewalling, virtual private network (VPN) and intrusion protection, and support for URL filtering, content filtering, and other third party solutions from Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video, and Integrated Data) partners. It also includes a 4-port, 10/100 Mbps switch for sharing broadband connections in small office or home network environments. The PIX 501 includes embedded, web-based single-device management using PIX Device Manager (PDM), and scalable, GUI-based, multi-firewall management from Cisco Secure Policy Manager (CSPM), as well as support for syslog, SNMP and telnet/SSH. The Cisco PIX 501 Firewall will be available this month with a starting price of $595 USD.