If you’re an experienced ISA or TMG firewall administrator, you realize that the firewall is actually a swiss army knife of firewalls. Why do I say this? As I’ve pointed out in the books I’ve written with Tom, the ISA and TMG firewalls provide a collection of features and capabilities that make them unique in the enterprise firewall market.
Consider the following features and capabilities that the TMG firewall supports:
- Remote access VPN server
- Site to site VPN gateway
- Stateful packet inspection firewall
- Application layer inspection firewall
- Forward and reverse web proxy server
- Forward Winsock proxy server
- Forward and reverse web caching server
- SIP gateway
- Email anti-spam/anti-malware gateway
- VoIP gateway
- Web anti-malware and URL filtering gateway
- Network Intrusion Inspection System/Intrusion Prevention System
In all likelihood, you’ll want to employ only a subset of features included in the TMG firewall. The problem is that if you want to do this, you’ll need to wade through hundreds of pages of material just to find the material that applies to your configuration. Wouldn’t be nice to have a single document that takes you end to end for just the deployment scenario that you’ve chosen?
That’s the goal of the Solution Guides. Right now, there are two Solution Guide available for the TMG firewall administrator:
- Secure Web Gateway Solution Guide
- Interoperability with BranchCache Solution Guide
From what I understand, there are going to be more Solutions Guides coming out in the future. These will be great for the busy TMG firewall admin, who has to get along with doing more with less time and fewer resources during these trying economic times.
Check out these solution guides over at:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee781941.aspx
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee658159.aspx
HTH,
Deb
DEBRA LITTLEJOHN SHINDER
MVP (Enterprise Security)
“MS SECURITY”
[email protected]