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One more component for the kitchen sink or real security value? That depends on what you're looking for. Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server is a mixed bag. It does offer some useful and innovative features, such as access control based on user and group affiliation, integrated caching of Web content, and transparent inbound Web proxying, similar to Novell's BorderManager. But for more complex scenarios, ISA Server doesn't quite meet expectations.
My test network at our Real-World Labs(R) at Syracuse University was straightforward (see "ISA Server Test Network," above right), and I was disappointed to see that I couldn't achieve the kind of access control, including restricting internal users from internal servers, with ISA Server that's possible with other common firewalls. ISA Server is a good fit in networks with modest access-control needs and simple architectures. For more granular access control to servers and services, you'd be better off with a dedicated firewall package.
I also found the real-time monitoring sparse, listing only current sessions and displaying few securityrelated events. ISA Server logs traffic to a set of log files in W3C format or an ISA Server text format; if you don't have a log parser running, these can be difficult to read. Optionally, events can be logged to an ODBC database. A few rudimentary reports can be scheduled to run-showing common statistics such as where traffic is going to or coming from, top talkers, and events-but they're high-level and don't provide the detailed data needed to effectively manage a security device.
ISA FLAVORS
ISA Server is available in both a standard edition and an enterprise edition. The standard edition, at $1,499 per CPU, is a standaloneserver product that doesn't require an Active Directory and supports up to four CPUs; in the case of multiple ISA Server computers, each one is managed individually. The enterprise edition, at $5,999 per...