Installation guide

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STEP 3: Deciding which firewall product you need
The choice of firewall depends on your needs, based on:
• the risks to your practice information.
• the available IT skills.
• your budget (with some solutions).
Step 8 of this tutorial includes some suggested firewall products that have been reviewed by General
Practice testers.
Different firewall scenarios
Depending on how your practice network is set up, and whether or not you want to provide web services,
there are different ways of positioning your firewall between the Internet and the computers you want to
protect.
1. Simple scenario
The simplest scenario is to place your firewall between your Internet access point (e.g. ADSL modem,
satellite modem, cable modem) and your network, as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1: simple separation of public and private network with a firewall
2. Separate web server firewall
If you want to run your own website to advertise your practice and possibly provide information for
downloading and browsing, you have to expose the computer that stores that information to the Internet.
That computer does not need to communicate with the rest of your private network, so you can isolate it
completely. However, you cannot leave it completely without protection. You still want to protect it from
being hacked into and defaced, so it needs a firewall too. Figure 2 is illustrates how to configure firewalls in
such a scenario.