Bullguard has for some time been a purveyor of respected and widely-used firewall software. Regularly notching up awards and gradually increasing its exposure, it might not be - thankfully - as in-your-face as a Norton product, but Bullguard's work nonetheless has proven to be reliable and effective.

Parallel to this, and the increased need for firewalls, has been a sizeable boost in online gaming, buoyed by cheaper, faster broadband connections and the lowering of the barriers to entry.

Yet this has presented a problem, and it's one that SteelSecurity - developed under the SteelSeries brand in conjunction with Bullguard - has been developed to solve. Namely that firewall software has a habit, in some cases, of obstructing online gaming, to the point where some gamers have to turn their firewall off completely, leaving their PC exposed.

Now admittedly, some applications have dealt with this quite well over the past year or so and have evolved to address this problem. But to our knowledge this is the first gaming-specific product to sell itself off the back of such feature, whereby online gaming and PC security can happily exist side by side.

It achieves this goal via the use of profiles, many of which come pre-loaded into SteelSecurity, with more available to download from the product's Web site. This is backed by a pledge to offer auto-updates as new games are released to market, which is fortunate since the initial list only really takes us up to summer 2006's releases, although the site's download sees things brought much more up to date.

It's a logical idea, as it wisely keeps the majority of users clear of the kind of settings and options they're better off not fiddling with. So, for instance, were you about to load up a game of World Of Warcraft, SteelSecurity would detect this and enter its dedicated game mode (you can change settings to do this fully automatically, or to be asked about it first). This then uses less resources than you'd usually associate with a firewall and anti-virus solution, to minimise lag, yet offers no obvious compromise to your machine's security.

What's happening behind the scenes is that the program has executed an individual profile for the title in question and is automatically allowing the routines associated with it through the firewall. For each game profile you can go in and manually edit the settings if you choose, but in our testing we found the defaults did the job well. We tried it across a series of games: Pro Evolution Soccer 5, Call Of Duty 2, Counter-strike, Prey and Medal of Honor. We barely noticed that Steel Security was even running.

Underneath all of this is a twelve-month subscription to a firewall, spam filter, backup and anti-virus services too, so what SteelSecurity effectively amounts to is a strong security package that formalises and draws attention to its toleration of games. Granted, as mentioned earlier, it's not necessarily offering something that's not under the hood of certain applications already, but the company excels in this area and the whole package - replete with three-user licence - is very strong.

It's surprisingly that nobody has really presented such a package this way before, and SteelSecurity undoubtedly hits its target audience exceptionally well. And if the updates keep coming - which we've no reason to doubt - then it's a smashing investment for the online gamer.

A simple and logical idea to protect gamers from the more unpleasant aspects of online gaming, executed with real skill and impact.