Personal Firewall or IPSec

IPSec or Personal Firewall?

Recently, Microsoft Malaysia shares lots of info on IPSec. From vendor point of view, we explain it as below:

IPSec and a personal firewall can be used to permit or prevent communications on the network, when should you use one or the other? While the answer is not always clear, my dear customers, peers and friends, here are some guidelines:

A personal firewall is not equipped to provide secure communications between computers - this is for sure. The purpose of a personal firewall is to block or allow communications between the computer. For example, a personal firewall cannot encrypt communications. When you need to secure communications, IPSec should be your choice.

IPSec was not designed to act as a personal firewall - this also you need to put into your consideration. It can only permit or block communications based on port numbers, or IP address. Nowadays, new firewalls provide stateful filtering and application layer filtering, neither of which can be done by IPSec.

IPSec can be scripted in a Windows Server 2003 or Windows 2000 domain, IPSec policies can be configured in Group Policy and deployed to thousands and thousands of computers. IPSec also can block incoming and outgoing communications, while some firewalls only block incoming communications - thats what by default of Windows Firewall.

Finally, IPSec can be applied to systems during startup to protect communications before all services are initialized. Many personal firewalls do not do this.