As the ISA firewall admin in your company, one of your duties is to make sure that the check writers in your company don’t fall for the FUD the “hardware” firewall vendors shoot at them in order to get them to move away from the ISA firewall for a more expensive, lower powered, solution.
One of the ploys the hardware firewall sales guys often pull is the deep packet inspection ruse. They’ll tell your check writer that the ISA firewall doesn’t perform deep packet inspection (which is false, BTW). But your boss doesn’t know what deep packet inspection is, so he’s likely to swallow that information hook, line and sinker.
What you need is a way to counter the hardware firewall guys’s sales FUD. When it comes to issue of deep packet inspection, Jim Harrison has provided you with a great article that you can use to shoot down the hardware firewall guys’ claims. Check out Jim’s article “Deep Packet Inspection”; What Does it Mean, Really? at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707728.aspx This article provides you the ammunition you need to make sure that your ISA firewall stays in place.
HTH,
Tom
Thomas W Shinder, M.D., MCSE
Sr. Consultant / Technical Writer
Prowess Consulting www.prowessconsulting.com
PROWESS CONSULTING documentation | integration | virtualization
Email: [email protected]
MVP — Forefront Edge Security (ISA/TMG/IAG)