On the ‘net: Rethinking Firewalls

In January of 1995, Network Translation’s PIX firewall received the “hot product of the year” award from Data Communications Magazine. While the PIX was originally designed to perform Network Address Translation (NAT), doing for the IP host market what the PBX market did for the telephone, the PIX itself quickly morphed into the original appliance-based firewall. In those heady days in the Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC), we spent hours thinking through how best to build a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) using PIX’s and routers so the network simply could not be penetrated. We built walls around our networks to defend them against the hoards of horseback riding invaders. @ECI