Hardware firewall is a dedicated hardware device (Appliance) with a proprietary operating system or Hardened Kernel (operating system core). They include network routing as additional feature. These firewalls are designed to handle large amounts of network traffic. Hardware firewalls are often placed on the perimeter of the network to filter the internet traffic and only allow pre-determined traffic into the network. Sometimes hardware firewalls are used in combination with software firewalls so the hardware firewall filters out the traffic and the software firewall inspects the network traffic. The combination optimizes the network throughput. |
