The small and perfectly formed Firewalla Purple is not much bigger than a box of matches and yet it ... [+] has sufficient power to secure your home network and protect you from cyber bandits.

Imagine if there was no front door on your house. What would you do? Put a curtain up? Maybe some bamboo beads? No. You’d buy the most robust and thermally efficient door to protect your home from intruders and the elements.

Now imagine if there were no virtual doors on your home network. What would you do? Like many people, you’d probably do nothing, or you might rely on the firewall built into the router your Internet provider gave you. But, frankly, that’s not good enough. Hackers are getting smarter, while threats on the Internet can compromise your private data or harm your family. If you want to keep your data and family safe, you need the equivalent of a strong door with a decent lock and a video alarm system to stop anyone from accessing your network.

Firewalla Purple is a great little box of tricks I’ve been testing for a couple of weeks. I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t have any special security measures on my home network as it wasn’t high on my list of priorities. Furthermore, I feel ashamed to admit that even though technology is my specialist field, I’d never paid sufficient attention to the weakness in my home network.

Despite its relatively small size, the Firewalla Purple is incredibly powerful.

The little Firewalla Purple is about the size of a box of kitchen matches. It provides gigabit cyber security protection in a tiny device that plugs into your home network and sits there, watching everything on your network like a cyber sentry.

Firewalla Purple uses some incredibly slick software and firmware to monitor a network 24/7, blocking anything nasty, protecting family members from unwanted content, sniffing out cyberattacks before they happen, and then blocking them. It doesn’t require a subscription; once installed, it simply sits on the network, monitoring every inflow and outflow and issuing alerts whenever there’s a problem.

Firewalla Purple is just one of three Firewalla devices, each made for a different size of network and all three devices work at the network layer level. Firewalla is the brainchild of Jerry Chen and his colleagues Melvin Tu and Annie Lu. For 20 years, Chen worked for Cisco alongside his two colleagues in a tight-knit cyber security team. What these three people don’t know about cyber threats is probably not worth knowing.

The front of the Firewalla Purple features Gigabit WAN and LAN ports so it can be flexibly placed to ... [+] suit the topography of the network.

One day, Chen discovered that the security camera monitoring his baby daughter’s bedroom had been hacked. He immediately set about developing an affordable device that could monitor a complete network and actively protect its users and any of the devices attached to it. Chen wanted the device to be easy to use, but he also wanted it to have plenty of advanced features for those who want them and know how to use them.

The scope of the Firewalla Purple is extensive. It doesn’t require any specialist knowledge but has some incredibly advanced features that users can delve into if they understand networks. The Firewalla Purple is ideal for anyone without a clue about cybersecurity. Just plug it into the router or between the router and mesh network. Then, you can forget about it.

Firewalla has a great set of parental controls that can block almost any unwanted content and even turn off access to categories of traffic like social media, gambling, porn and gaming using the incredibly slick Firewalla smartphone app. There’s no need to unplug the router; you can turn off access to individual users and sit back and wait for them to start complaining. It’s a great way of getting kids to concentrate on homework and can even be programmed to disconnect at certain times of the day, such as when the kids should be asleep. Meanwhile, the grown-ups can continue streaming a movie or doing work online.

The Firewalla smartphone app is a powerhouse for controlling all aspects of the Firewalla Purple. ... [+] You can delve into it as much as you want or leave the device to get on with protecting your network.

Firewalla Purple also includes a VPN server and client to ensure private information isn’t compromised when using public Wi-Fi in a coffee shop or airport. In addition, Firewalla can protect a user’s privacy when on the road thanks to the VPN server, which is free to use and attracts no monthly charges.

The VPN server can secure access to a home or office network when working away from home and provides secure access to the Internet when using public Wi-Fi. The VPN server is ideal for remotely working from home and connecting to the office's corporate network. The VPN client enables the user to connect as many devices as they want to the Internet using a third-party VPN without the need to install any VPN software.

If pop-up adverts are the bane of your life, Firewalla Purple can easily swat those pesky things. If you’re worried if anyone is tracking the sites you’re browsing, Firewalla’s built-in ad blocker ensures you’ll never see another advert again. More importantly, those adverts won’t be able to see any of your data. Firewalla Purple does all this by pointing your configured DNS server to an internal DNS cache stored inside the device, speeding up the DNS lookup and making browsing even faster.

The Firewalla Purple is powered by any 5V USB-C charger and once installed it can be forgotten ... [+] about. The smartphone app will warn you if there are any issues.

As well as containing essential cybersecurity tools, the Firewalla Purple is a powerful network manager. It can monitor a network’s performance and tweak it. It can handle network delays using Smart Queues while managing bandwidth usage. Smart Queues can decongest a network by prioritizing significant traffic, resulting in smoother Zoom calls or movies without buffering. Rules can be used to decide what traffic is permitted on the network, while the Routes function sorts out where and how traffic is sent to client devices on the network.

If you are a home worker, you can also use Firewalla Purple to set up two virtual and separate networks for home and work. There are significant advantages in having two networks as it can protect your home network from security checks by an employer’s IT department while also protecting the employer’s network from any potential threats lurking on the home network.

Verdict: The Firewalla Purple is an incredibly sophisticated device that can provide blanket security to a home network and you don’t need any detailed knowledge of how to manage networks. You can plug in the Firewalla Purple into the network and leave it to do its stuff. The sophisticated Firewalla smartphone app can turn features on and off and is also great for monitoring how much data you’re using or the speed and health of your Internet connection. There are loads of advanced features and data logging functions, so you can look at the cyber-nasties that Firewalla Purple has protected you from. It’s a great way of securing your home network without signing up for a subscription or software-based security systems. The Firewalla Purple will keep your network safe and is much cheaper than a strong front door.

Pricing & Availability: Firewalla Purple is available now and costs $329 but watch out for special offers.

Packed with features, the Firewalla Purple is a very effective way of protecting your network, data ... [+] and family from the threats lurking online.