I AM saying that if you have Internet access to your network, a firewall is
extremely important.
and you're wrong. a firewall is just a tool for reducing the difficulty
of your threat analysis. it doesn't inherently make your network more
secure. what makes your network secure (to the extent that it is)
is the the fact that you have done the threat analysis and blocked the
holes that you've identified through that analysis. a firewall can
make the job easier by reducing the number of cases that you have to
consider, but it does not make your network secure. what's more, you
can often do this job better without a firewall than with one, because
firewalls can acutally cause security holes that didn't exist before.
Keith