The Cisco PIX 500 Firewall offers a multilayered defence for small offices through rich security services including stateful inspection firewalling, protocol and application inspection, virtual private networking (VPN), in-line intrusion protection, and rich multimedia and voice security in a single device.  Small offices benefit from the Cisco PIX 500's additional layer of security via intelligent, application-aware security services that examine packet streams at Layers 4-7. Administrators can also easily create custom security policies for firewall traffic by using the flexible access control methods and the more than 100 predefined applications, services, and protocols that Cisco PIX Security Appliances provide.