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What is a firewall?A firewall physically sits between your network and the Internet and hides your network from others on the Internet. At its most basic level, a firewall is really an Internet router that makes decisions on what to let in and out of your network and what to block. Although no technology can guarantee complete safety, a properly designed network with a firewall system, reputable antivirus software, and alert support staff can significantly reduce the risk. Why do I need one?Armies of automated attackers are out there, probing for weaknesses every minute of every day. A bad guy from across the world with a political agenda wants to use your bandwidth to attack his enemy. A high-school teenager with time on his hands wants to make a name for himself in the underground cracker community. You don’t want to be an easy target for these guys! Assuming I need a firewall, what choices are available?At the low end of the market are $100 – $200 packages that offer limited capability and very little capacity. Installation and ongoing support cost more. If you have a network with 5 computers or less, your business will never grow, and communicating via the Internet isn’t very important to you, consider one of these appliances. In the mid range are more sophisticated appliances for $3000 - $5000. These will work with networks of up to a few hundred computers. Installation and ongoing support cost more. At the high end are enterprise systems priced at $10,000 or more, designed to handle very large, very complex networks. Installation and ongoing support cost significantly more! Sounds like the market is pretty much covered – how does InfraSupport fit in?After several years of quiet R&D, InfraSupport is pleased to offer firewall protection priced in the low-end range, but with many of the same capabilities of today’s enterprise systems. It isn’t often when a vendor can credibly claim it has a category killer offering – this is one of those times. While others deliver hardware in a cardboard box, the InfraWall system is a fixed price project. The project isn’t complete until the firewall demonstrates it’s doing its job. After comparing the true total cost of acquiring, installing, and supporting other firewall systems, the InfraWall system costs no more than the low-end appliances. How can you possibly offer this? How does it work?Raw materials include a recycled PC, vintage 1999 or newer. These are available by the thousands at very low cost from hundreds of suppliers. InfraSupport uses this hardware and a customized Linux kernel to set up a firewall system tailored to your exact needs. We make this offer – and deliver it profitably – because we use rock-solid, open-source software. My network is very large and complex – what can you offer me?Our system can do incredibly sophisticated routing to handle diverse populations of users. We can load-balance among several incoming telecom circuits and we can dedicate different Internet circuits to different groups of systems or users. We can set up DMZ networks, honeypots, and other peripheral networks adjacent to your internal network. We can help eradicate virus and worm attacks, troubleshoot connectivity problems, and assist application programs that need to communicate with outside systems. We can monitor your key servers and Internet connections and notify you when problems come up. We can shape traffic to ensure time-critical data such as VOIP and videoconferencing get top priority. The InfraWall system can handle dozens or hundreds of internal web, DNS, email, ftp, and other servers that need to be visible across the Internet. We also offer virtual private networks (VPNs), so you can use the Internet to work from home or connect branch sites. Given a properly designed server configuration, you can literally use an InfraWall VPN to run your entire network from anywhere on the planet Earth with an Internet connection. As an extra option, you can monitor and control web usage with our InfraWall system. InfraSupport resells SmartFilter from Secure Computing, the best web filtering system on the market. With a SmartFilter subscription service, you can set web access policies as you see fit and you can change those policies at will. My network is very small – how can I afford what you’re offering?Compare the total cost for an InfraWall system with an entry-level appliance: When that entry-level appliance arrives in the cardboard box, you must unpack it, figure out how to plug it in, and figure out how to set it up. You can either struggle with it yourself or pay somebody else to do it. Either way, this costs time and money. Once you finally have it all up and running, you need to know if it’s really doing its job. After all, a firewall system is supposed to protect your network, right? So now, you must sink more time and money into this appliance figuring out how to monitor it – assuming it even has monitoring/logging tools. Suddenly, that appliance costs lots more than its acquisition price! With InfraSupport, a senior consultant works with you during presales, finding out all the relevant information about your network. InfraSupport then builds a system tailored for you and ensures it’s installed properly. For customers with an interest, InfraSupport also provides a tour of what’s inside. Sooner or later, all Internet connections experience problems. With the InfraWall troubleshooting tools, you will be able to pinpoint the problem and, in some cases, tell your Internet Service Provider (ISP) how to fix it. This capability alone could save you thousands of dollars in a critical situation. When your organization grows and becomes more complex, your InfraWall system will handle it. No more disrupting your operation to add more capability. Now which system do you think is more expensive? This all sounds great on paper, but lots of ideas sound good on paper. Beyond clever text editing what can you show me that’s tangible and real?Give InfraSupport a call and we will show you our own InfraWall system. You can also talk to our growing list of delighted customers. What about ongoing support?InfraSupport is pleased to offer an innovative ongoing support plan that includes remedial telephone assistance, along with emergency and routine hardware replacement. When new versions of software become available, most vendors require customers to go through a complex and risky upgrade process. When a new release of the InfraWall system becomes available, InfraSupport will send out a fully configured system, tailored exactly for your organization. Simply unplug the old system, plug in the new system, and send the old system back to InfraSupport. But isn’t it safer and easier and less expensive and less risk for me to deal with a large, well-known company? Why should I trust InfraSupport?Does anyone still own computers from Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell? More recently, how about Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq? The business world is littered with big names and so-called “safe” companies no longer in business. Most recently, even venerable IBM sold its PC division to the Chinese. InfraSupport is a very small company with less than $1 million in annual revenue. And yet InfraSupport generated more profit and cash flow recently than Worldcom, Qwest, Enron, Lucent, Tyco, Adelphia, AT&T, General Motors, and Norrthwest Airlines combined. So who is more stable than whom? A rational analysis of history reveals that “bigness” versus “smallness” is a lousy yardstick to measure risk. Dig deeper. Challenge what we say. Educate yourself, beyond anyone’s vendor hype. Consult textbooks, independent web sites, and other objective literature. Talk to other customers. Learn the truth – the real truth. Give InfraSupport an opportunity to prove it can do what we say it can do. Make an informed, rational choice. The InfraWall solution from InfraSupport makes the most sense. |
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