Network Security Recommendation

I am the IT Director at our local hospital and I have been working the network since it went down last week unexpectedly. The problem was a "Sonicwall" we had installed, it lost it's configuration somehow, anyway for a temporary solution we re-configured our Netopia Bellsouth Router/Modem to spit out the DHCP and Subnet's we use internally.

The reason for the Sonicwall was because it served as a firewall and content filter so this would be a plus, the content filter that is. We have tried to access the SonicWALL but we can't access it so we're going to simply replace it.

Currently, we're only going thru the Bellsouth DSL/Router, we need something else in between the DSL/Router and the workstations to replace the Sonicwall, do you have any recommendations?

 

For something robust enough to handle the size of a hospital network....probably the most economical would be to build a linux distro router, so that you maintain IDS, content filtering, antivirus filtering, etc...maintain some HIPAA compliance.

However...as a hospital, I'd imagine you have maintained a support contract with Sonicwall, their support should get you Sonicwall back up and online in a matter of hours, if the unit is dead, replacement next day...either way, shorter than the time it takes to find/build/configure a replacement of sub-par.

 

I particularly like the products from watchguard and they are easy to setup with good support. link is here http://www.watchguard.com/products/

 

I'm partial to Astaro (I use their now free software appliance in a Virtual Machine and finjan (as I own a NG-1100 appliance.)
Where's the Sonicwall support?...phone and web.

 

As of today we have ordered a Small Business Server with Windows Server 2003, I am going to use this for a domain controller and MS ISA Server. We haven't got everything configured yet, I wanted to get some comments first.

Is this an ideal way to secure a network with approx. fifty workstations?

 

You may want to investigate SmoothWall or one of it's derivatives.
Find it here: http://www.smoothwall.org/

This one is Free, but it is powerfull.

I hope this helps.