Results from performance testing illustrate how quickly the firewall can perform before degradation becomes an issue. Results also demonstrate whether a firewall can handle heavy traffic without crashing or allowing access of unauthorized data. Load is designed to stress the network bandwidth so that performance degradation can be measured. By providing maximum throughput, the speed of the firewall's checking capability becomes crucial. The results of these tests provide quantitative data demonstrating the performance of a product in actual heavy usage situations.
Performance measures the delay introduced by the addition of the firewall.
The purpose of using an Intranet versus the Internet is that Intranets provide a much faster wire speed and, thus, a greater risk of performance degradation by the introduction of a firewall. The goal of management tests is to determine the ease and effectiveness of firewall configuration routines. We configure the firewall to deal with three common scenarios and evaluate each product for security and ease of configuration. The management scenario testing differs from usability tests in that it is designed for a particular real-world scenario rather than a single generic solution. This becomes critical in that performance may be sacrificed for greater security or the usability of setting configuration parameters may hinder proper implementation of the product.