what is more important to your network ?

QoS is important; but relying on QoS for stopping today's threats is not practical.  Today's threats demand better technologies and features like Deep packet inspection, heuristics, IDS / IPS, gateway antivirus s/w, etc  All these features combined together can provide reasonable security assurance.  The days of using fixed ports or tools for attacks are no longer the case.  I would rely on a Firewall with most of these facilities for security rather than on QoS.

QoS is typically good enough if there is enough bandwidth for most services. Without firewalls/security, your network can be brought down by multiple attacks, worms, etc. I think firewall trumps QoS when it comes to importance, and not only that, not having firewalls can impede the delivery of QoS in the network.

I agree with ankit that firewall is the best security measure to protect from unauthorised access.

A firewall is an integrated collection of security measures designed to prevent unauthorized electronic access to a networked computer system. It is also a device or set of devices configured to permit, deny, encrypt, decrypt, or proxy all computer traffic between different security domains based upon a set of rules and other criteria.

A system designed to prevent unauthorized access to or from a private network. Firewalls can be implemented in both hardware and software, or a combination of both. Firewalls are frequently used to prevent unauthorized Internet users from accessing private networks connected to the Internet, especially intranets. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the firewall, which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria

i agree to but even CISCO PIX/ASA are a good option atleast better then checkpoints.

Even ios firewall like ZBF can be used on routers if you dont wnt to go for physical firewall device.

sorry my dear friend but i dont agree with you over here.

Safety is not an outcome of quality...

Qos is a tottaly different feature used to make your network communicate faster with the outside world.

by not creating a bottleneck for the traffic to go out of your network,

you can achieve this via policing , traffic shapping , or priortizing the traffic...

Making your network secure totally depends upon what kind a firewall you are using is it a host based or h/w based.

for big organizations it's better to have a h/w firewall.. as it helps you making your network secure and achieving qos feature and if yu want to go out for more sec feature you can use IPS/IDS in inline/promiscuos feature with fail close ...

Well Firewalls are like guards with discretionary powers. If they are not able to detect a vulnerability and they let it through then the whole idea is defeated. But nonetheless products like ZoneAlarm and Tipping point are excellent products for overall network security.

i too agree on that

i agree with ashuthosh on this that both QOS and Firewall are important, where large organization will require Qos mainly and smaller ones can have just firewall stuff

Both are critical elements. In a big company environment network QoS is predominant where as for personal & small offices firewall is important......