In working with several small to mid-sized companies I'm finding more and more of them that are really not well-equipped as far as their border networking is concerned. Several have consumer grade network devices, often router/WAP devices from Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, etc. While these companies all make very good devices, they are really consumer-grade and don't offer some of the more advanced features that products from Sonicwall, Juniper, SnapGear, etc. With these $400 - $1000 products you get more sophisticated networking capabilities, anti-virus, anti-spam, port/data type blocking, etc. Some have real-time intrusion detection and blocking of malicious activity. Unfortunately, many do require annual subscriptions for the full feature set so factor that into your buying decision. I'm fond of the devices that are more open-source based, such as the SnapGear because of the lack of licensing costs and the fact that they used standards-based protocols and don't require proprietary clients for connecting (seems like most of the VPN clients for most of the bigger brands are licensed individually).
ComputerWorld did a nice write up about a few of them and what to look for.
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