You see, it is more cost effective to steal the secrets of your competition than it is to spend millions of dollars for research and development. Unless good encryption is employed, they can make copies of the computer 'secrets' without leaving any trace or clue that they even compromised such secrets. Lets face it. Most written communications today are created on computers. Most of these computers are not secure and to make matters worse many computers involved are portable notebook computers.
File encryption helps here also.
An Internet firewall is essentially one or more systems that control access between computer networks. In this regard, the Internet is nothing more than a very large computer network. It is not enough to just install an Internet firewall. The most important thing to remember about a firewall is that it creates an access control policy for the organization. Executive management and the computer security staff must be involved in defining what the access policy will be prior to purchase and installation.