Don't know anything about GajShield but would offer our experience of Astaro
1. It has an intuitive user interface placing the packet filter at the heart of it. Customers without Cisco Certified training or equivalent can get their firewall setup and working without too much problem.
2. VPN is a great strength of the product. Used by banks in Germany, so it has the serious kinds of features required by them.
3. The intrusion detection system can be used to kill stone dead the abuse of a network by the wallys that install P2P or use MSN/etc. to waste work time.
4. The WebFiltering is an excellent feature that can easily be setup to limit access to inappropriate webcontent by staff, while still allowing the bosses wider access, e.g. to job searching sites for hiring staff while disallowing the staff from using the same sites for finding new jobs.
For me, security - i.e. real protection of your network comes down to having a tool that you can easily understand and setup to do what you need to. All firewalls provide pretty much similar features. It is a difference of large quantities to compare encryption levels, vulnerabilities, etc. The real issue for me is how much time it takes to set it up to do a good job - as the biggest vulnerability is setting up a firewall poorly.
So give me a good user interface over features anyday. It is only if a customer needs security to the level where they get third party vulnerability or penetration testing that these features might actually become important. That becomes the issue when you have information worth millions of bucks to protect and industrial espionage type people trying to hack your network. If you are in this kind of area, then you probably also have physical security including biometric access control to a building to consider.
The saving in the cost of buying a firewall can be drowned by the hours wasted dealing with a difficult to understand, configure and maintain firewall.
My thoughts, hope of use.
Best Regards,
