A firewall is a device that is located at the network gateway designed to prevent unauthorised access to or from a private network. Since the introduction of firewall technology to protect ADSL and leased line connectivity, firewalls have rapidly evolved into greater levels of sophistication.

Many services which traditionally would be found on the Local Area Network such as Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Anti-Spam and Intrusion Prevention services can now be activated as applications on the firewall, adding a further level of protection at the network entry point.

Other features such as Gigabit transfer speeds, load balancing, fail-over and network security zoning are now becoming more common place on corporate models of firewall at the higher end of the market.

Several brands are available as both wired and wireless platforms to allow for the most convenient physical location of the firewall device within an organisation. Remote users can use on-board Virtual Private Network capabilities to securely link to office-based applications and information, furthermore add-on management and reporting tools enable network administrators to view statistics on staff web-browsing activities.

Entry-level firewalls are available for home office and small office users whilst other models are scalable up to several hundred users for corporate clients. For companies deploying multiple firewalls at geographically dispersed locations or on a global scale, applications exist which allow all security devices to be managed from a single centralised point.

Typically the firewall is sized based upon the number of network nodes (i.e. network devices that require an Internet Protocol address)

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