One of the most important things you can do to secure your data and work towards PCI compliance is to install and maintain a commercial grade firewall.
In fact, requirement #1 of the PCI-Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) requires that you have and maintain a firewall to protect your customers’ credit card data. This means that you must implement a more robust firewall than the home computer firewalls that are available off the shelf.
* Your commercial grade firewall must include these features:
– Intrusion prevention system (IPS) with regular updates to the IPS list of potential threats.
– Ability to filter incoming data traffic for malware.
– Network segmentation to keep cardholder data separate from email, Internet, etc.
There are 2 or 3 firewall products that we feel stand above the others and that we recommend to our customers. Our techs can help you decide which product will work best for you. This is a "get it done now project". Don’t put it off.
* (parts of this information has been excerpted from Radiant’s Data Security Bulletin)