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FIREWALLS AND THEIR BENEFITS The application of firewalls in a network system provides numerous benefits to network administrators. Fred Simonds advises in his book Network Security that a firewall can provide controlled access of individual users, enhanced privacy of the organization and its data, and provide a single point of contact between the Internet and the interior network (263). There are also three different types of firewalls each providing a different approach for providing security to a network system as indicated by Lars Klander in his book Hacker Proof (84). Rita C. Summers provides the following definition of a firewall in her book, Secure Computing: “A firewall is a collection of components placed between an inner network and an outer network to achieve the following goals: - all traffic must pass through the firewall. - only traffic that is authorized by the inner network’s security policy is allowed to pass. - the firewall can not be penetrated.” (506) In simpler terms, a firewall acts to keep intruders out and allow only authorized users in. In achieving these goals, a firewall protects computers from hostile intrusion that could compromise confidentiality or initiate lost or corrupted dat