But chances are you need more than that. For example you might want a firewall that can reject denial of service attacks, ferret out worms and viruses, prevent access to certain Web sites or even filter out spam. And, of course, you could very well want the ability to support remote users securely or handle some basic intrusion prevention and detection tasks.
On the other hand, the product has to be affordable.
I took a quick look at some of the products available, and I found a couple that seem to work for Louise and her company. The first is D-Link's DFL-80, which supports her basic requirements completely. It's not even very expensive, at around $250. It will let her remote user connect through a secure VPN tunnel. However, it won't scan for viruses or spam.
Louise might be better off with the Fortinet Fortigate 60. This is a higher-performance device from a company that also makes enterprise and service-provider products. It does deep packet inspection, filters worms, viruses and spam, updates itself automatically, and is available in a version that also includes a wireless access point. However, it costs about $700 for the standard version, and about $900 for the Wi-Fi version.
There are others out there, notably from SonicWall.
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