Re: all-in-one vs one-on-each (feat. Comercial vs FOSS)

[Ansgar -59cobalt- Wiechers <bugtraq () planetcobalt net>]

On 2008-05-24 Alex wrote:
> I would like some opinions, again.
> For a fixed budget would you go for 
>  * an all-in-one "Firewall" ( FW+IPS+VPN+...) ie. Checkpoint,
>  * a dedicated, known and expensive firewall/gateway with the company of
> an Open Source solution for IPS, URL filtering etc?
>  * a full Open Source solution (iptables,snort,ossec,squid etc) and
> spend the money elsewhere :)
>
> The things that concern me are,
>
> Redundancy. I can live without IPS for a while but not without Internet
> ( and by "I" I mean "The Company")
> Scalability. Not only performance-wise but cost-wise too. I think that
> having to pay for every "extra feature" is going to lead to Open Source
> anyway...
> Complexity. Better to manage one than more, right?...

The answer to your question depends heavily on the actual requirements,
your network topology, your admins' expertise, and what kind of "fixed
budget" you have.

Regards
Ansgar Wiechers
-- 
"All vulnerabilities deserve a public fear period prior to patches
becoming available."
--Jason Coombs on Bugtraq