You work as a Network Administrator for NetTech Inc. The company's network is connected to the Internet. For security, you want to restrict unauthorized access to the network with minimum…

A brouter combines bridging and routing functions for network connectivity purposes and is not designed to enforce security access control policies.

A hardware firewall appliance sits at the network perimeter and inspects, filters, and controls traffic based on defined security policies, blocking unauthorized access effectively. It provides centralized, dedicated security enforcement without requiring per-host software configuration, which minimizes administrative effort. This directly satisfies both the hardware-based and low-overhead requirements of the scenario.

A standard router provides basic packet-level filtering but lacks the stateful inspection, application-layer filtering, and comprehensive security policy capabilities of a dedicated firewall.

A proxy server can mediate and filter some traffic but is typically a software-based solution running on a general-purpose host, which does not satisfy the requirement for a hardware-based implementation.