If you travel often and take your laptop with you, you would do well to be wary of strange access points. Hotel networks, library internet jacks--they all potentially hide dangerous threats, insecure or compromised computers, or data thieves waiting for vulnerable machines to appear. I'm not trying to scare anyone, but the dangers of free internet access are right there alongside the benefits. Sure, you can learn all you can and go to lengths to secure your computer from the threats that linger, install and configure software firewalls, and make sure your system is as impenetrable as possible. Alternatively (or even additionally) you can use a hardware firewall to give your precious data another layer of protection. That's where the Yoggie Gatekeeper Pro comes in.

The Gatekeeper is a tiny device, so small it fits in the palm of your hand. Don't let the size fool you, however: It has Linux under the hood, and the Gatekeeper is packed with impressive features that cheaper firewalls could only dream of supporting. Built into that tiny package are fully featured anti-spam, anti-virus, and anti-spyware utilities that can prevent malicious software from making its way to your computer, and stateful packet inspection that will drop and filter our malformed packets and ICMP (ping) requests. The Gatekeeper even has Web and e-mail proxies built in. Additionally, Web filtering and URL categorization is included, so you can make sure that you and anyone else who uses your computer while it's connected to the Gatekeeper stays on the light side of the Web.

The Gatekeeper isn't cheap. It will set you back $219. Even so, the security of traveling with a such a feature-rich firewall might be worth the money. If you travel for business often and keep sensitive customer or corporate information on your laptop, I'm certain it's worth the money.