BIOS: Technology Means Business

The ZyWALL P1 (£165/$291) is the industry’s first palm-sized - and hence portable - personal firewall. Not only does the ZyWALL P1 have size on its size, it’s also very easy to install and manage centrally by administrators to enforce corporate security policies. Although the device has been available since April in the US, it’s only just made its way over to European shores.

You may be surprised to know that the major source of network threats has turned from external attacks to internal contamination. All kinds of network attacks or threats can easily slip into the corporate network and its workstations by way of employees’ laptops and other portable device, which could have been infected at home or during business trips.

To address this issue, ZyXEL’s ZyWALL P1 is designed for individual users to gatekeep their network connection and prevent the corporate network from being infected. It also helps network administrators to enforce the security policy on every endpoint PC remotely. A personal firewall is currently the only effective solution to enhance user-end network security. Unlike software-based firewall, hardware-based and software-independent firewalls like the ZyWALL P1 can prevent software installation conflict, or errors from operator interaction.

The ZyWALL P1 is an extremely compact and portable device measuring just 129x82x20mm and weighing only 130g. The silver-and-red device boasts a WAN port and a LAN port, and can be powered by the USB port for additional convenience (an AC adapter is also included). Although small in performance, the ZyWALL P1 is big in features. The ICSA-certified firewall offers 90Mbit/s throughput, as well as comprehensive SPI, DoS/DDoS and access control features, and real-time attack alerts and logs. There’s also an ICSA-certified IPSec VPN tunnel with hardware-accelerated DES/3DES/AES encryption at up to 34Mbit/s throughput.

The firewall supports ZyXEL’s Vantage CNM centralised network management software through a recent firmware upgrade, which enables administrators to employ the policy enforcer for ensuring the remote employee computers to comply to security policies before entering the corporate network. On the other hand, the Vantage CNM can also help IT staff to manage scattered ZyWALL P1s and handle the situation more effectively when computers are being attacked.

While the Zywall P1 works really well as a security device, it’s not cheap at £145 (especially if you want to equip all your network users), it only works with wired networks (Ethernet, Fast Ethernet), and it doesn’t support profiles. The importance of profiles is that with a portable device it’s likely that you’ll want to use it on a various networks, each with their own security policies.

If you have a basic ADSL modem then you won’t necessarily have an Ethernet interface to hook the firewall up to. Likewise, if you have a router with an Ethernet interface then you’ll probably already have a firewall built into that anyway. And, to boot, software firewalls such as ZonbeLabs’ excellent ZoneAlarm Pro ($49.95/£28.28) can’t be lost or stolen. There are cheaper and better options for the home user, but small-business users with telecommuters may find the Zywall P1 ideal for connecting them securely to the corporate VPN. [7]

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