 |  |
26.5. When Should You Start Over?
One of the most important things to recognize about maintaining a firewall is that the older it is, the more maintenance it's going to require. At some point, you simply need to say "enough" and start over with a new firewall. At the rate the firewall arena is changing today, we generally tell people that if they build the best firewall they can today, they should probably plan on replacing it in 18 to 36 months. Lots of things that affect firewalls are changing very fast, including the attacks they're subjected to, the tools for building them, and the services their users demand.Here are a few examples of how quickly things can change on the Internet. Between the first and second editions of this book:
- Windows NT became a viable platform for providing Internet services.
- The World Wide Web went from being a promising application that computer people knew about to being the most important technology on the Internet and an indispensable part of any advertising campaign for anything.
- Linux went from being one person's eccentric hobby to being something between a major operating system and a social uprising.
|  | |
| 26.4. How Long Does It Take? |  | 27. Responding to Security Incidents |
