A couple of years ago I reviewed a personal firewall appliance the size of an internal CD-ROM drive, and I remember being impressed – not for the first time – by technology’s ability to downsize. Since then firewalls have got even smaller.

Just a week ago I had a look at a personal firewall called the Yoggie GateKeeper Pro. From the outside it looks like an MP3 player, while inside is the same XScale processing technology that powers BlackBerry devices and iPaq handhelds. Designed to be plugged between a laptop and a broadband connection, this nifty little device boasts firewall, content-filtering, antivirus, anti-spyware, and anti-spam capabilities. In fact, it just about does everything but make the tea.

It would be easy for IT managers to preconfigure these devices for their road warriors and then let them loose. However, the compact size of the Gatekeeper Pro made me wonder whether they could be made even smaller. In fact, it wouldn’t be too much of a leap to weld something like this to the motherboard of a desktop or laptop system, would it? But then again, why not implement this in software? Well, the trouble with that approach, as anybody who runs antivirus software in real time on a laptop together with real-time intrusion prevention software knows, is that it can put a huge strain on the processor.

Having recently had to resurrect a friend’s laptop after it was crippled by a fairly hefty software intrusion detection and prevention system (IDP), I do wonder whether today’s laptops have enough muscle to run all these network security programs. So will firms always have to assign these power-hungry security functions to a dedicated unified threat management (UTM) appliance that runs in the server room?

Well, possibly not. For instance, one day a laptop may come along that boasts a multi-core processor architecture like Sun’s Niagara that will be more than capable of handling these CPU-hogging programs.

So, when mobile network security is thus sorted, the only other thing that may needle our road warrior would be slow access to enterprise systems over WAN links. Hang on, though, didn’t WAN app acceleration specialist Packeteer recently release software for laptops that addresses this very issue? Problem solved.

Maybe I’m being a bit over-optimistic in expecting the hardware technology we have today to run these hefty CPU-hungry applications. But as a colleague remarked the other day, today’s PCs would indeed be up to the task, if only some OS vendors would stop stuffing their products with useless, power-sapping bloatware.