You had me with you right up until financial data as a telling factor. In
considering financials you need to consider time public, other businesses,
opther investments, acquisitions, etc. So, by your criteria you should go
with IBM or Microsoft.
Both have things that people in their organizations call firewalls.
My suggestion -- now that you have a short list, start talking to
customers of those products and get future plans from each of the top 3
vendors on your list.
f
At 04:26 AM 11/14/97 -0600, Dave Elfering wrote:
>I've been beating a dead horse over our decision process to select a
>firewall product.
>
>The short list includes: (in order of preference)
> - TIS Gauntlet (Best of the proxies)
> - Checkpoint Firewall-1 (slick but is stateful inspection
>trustworthy?)
> - CyberGuard (slick and secure, but is it scaleable on an X86
>platform?)
>others in the mix for healthy comparison:
> - Sidewinder (Just haven't seen it)
> - Plain old FWTK (If all else fails theres ol' reliable)
>
>After reading all the color glossies there seem to be few real
>differentatiors between them.
>
>I've researched all the technical aspects (like the black cloud over
>Firewall-1's stateful inspection), but what has me potentially whittling
>down to the final vendor is financial data. Of the four companies, only
>Checkpoint is making any money. TIS's problem seems to simply boil down
>to investment in the new release, but Cyberguard's data has me
>wondering. Has anyone else looked at the financial status of the
>firewall vendors as a selecion criterea or am I chasing a red herring.
>
>I thought the security market was going bananas, so I hadn't imagined
>anyone losing money. I also wonder about overall market direction now
>that larger companies are getting into the act like Novell, Mickeysoft,
>etc. The whole industry looks to me to be at a shake out point (look at
>Milkyway). Maybe I'm just being anal retentive...
>
>Dave Elfering
>elfering @
worldnet .
att .
net
>
>
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