Secure Computing Releases Next Generation SMB Network Security Appliance

Secure Computing Corporation, a leading enterprise gateway security company, today announced SnapGear with TrustedSource, a newly enhanced version of its award-winning all-in-one Internet appliance for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and remote offices. The new version of SnapGear marks the third Secure Computing product integration with TrustedSource, the company’s global reputation system, and also delivers enhanced VoIP capabilities, VPN offloading, connection tracking snapshots, increased performance, and the ability to deliver customized local-language versions. Many of these new features are directly aimed at reducing the costs associated with growing and securing SMB networks.

As part of Secure Computing’s vision to provide comprehensive gateway security, SnapGear now incorporates global intelligence from the company’s industry-leading reputation system, TrustedSource. Like a credit agency provides credit scores to enable reliable commerce, TrustedSource provides behavior-based reputation scores for IPs, domains, URLs and email messages. Using this real-time scoring, SnapGear with TrustedSource allows organizations to drop connections from malicious sources at the gateway to help prevent security threats such as spam and phishing, reclaim bandwidth and reduce downstream server processing. Many companies find that these dropped connections lead to significant savings in administrative costs, server upgrade costs and additional bandwidth costs.

“By adding TrustedSource to SnapGear’s UTM appliance, Secure Computing offers SMBs the same reputation-based anti-spam solution available to much larger enterprises,” said Charles Kolodgy, research director at IDC. “Reputation-based filtering reduces malicious traffic (e.g., phishing, spam, and other attacks), but it can also reduce unwanted traffic from non-business sources (e,g., unsolicited newsletters, investment opportunities, etc.). Taken together, these two elements can reduce attacks and messaging volumes resulting in greater bandwidth availability and greater employee productivity.”

In addition to the integration of the TrustedSource reputation technology, the new version of the SnapGear appliance includes significant enhancements to performance, management and overall security, including the following:

• Quality of Service Enhancements: An L7 Classifier monitors and analyzes information passing through the network at the packet level, allowing specific types of data to be identified and prioritized over others. For example, VoIP phone conversations may be set to the highest priority, resulting in increased quality connectivity, and minimized phone call interruptions, thereby allowing SMBs to better leverage and save money through the use of VoIP technology.

• VPN Offloading: Further extending SnapGear’s VPN performance capabilities, this feature provides a simple configuration allowing businesses to leverage multiple, connected SnapGear appliances to handle unlimited VPN tunnels. This functionality provides businesses with the ability to increase the number of VPN tunnels into the network with no additional security concerns or administration requirements and at a fraction of the cost of the alternative — a VPN Concentrator.
• Performance: Increases of 10 to 20 percent in the amount of content passing through the appliance for stateful inspection saves companies from having to purchase additional appliances when more bandwidth is required.
• Connection Tracking Capabilities: On-demand connection tracking snapshots allow administrators to easily identify which machines are connecting to specific Internet locations and analyzes those connections in real time to determine particular events taking place, thereby optimizing troubleshooting and saving time and effort on the part of the administrator.
• Internationalization: For large orders, Secure Computing can now localize the SnapGear appliance, providing customers with a user interface in any language required. This dramatically increases administrative efficiencies and is especially beneficial to large OEMs, who may now order, deliver, train and support customers in local languages.

“Adding TrustedSource to the SnapGear appliance makes it the first reputation-based offering available to the SMB market,” said Atri Chatterjee, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Secure Computing. “Typically, SMBs are not in a position to employ enterprise-level solutions due to cost and complexity. Now, SMBs can leverage a time-tested solution built with the requirements of the largest enterprises with the most stringent security policies in mind. SnapGear is the first low-cost solution to make next generation, reputation-based systems available to a broader audience beyond just the Fortune 1000.”

SnapGear is the only networking device needed for office PCs to be networked with one another, connect securely to the Internet, connect to the corporate LAN, and service all remote access VPN needs. SnapGear handles it all easily and inexpensively by converging all networking, firewall, intrusion prevention, and remote access requirements into one high-speed, highly reliable appliance. With over 300,000 appliances in use today, Secure Computing’s SnapGear is a complete plug-and-play network-in-a-box Internet security appliance every small and medium-sized business needs.

Pricing and Availability
For a limited time, all SnapGear customers are eligible to receive a six-month trial license for SnapGear with TrustedSource at no additional cost. The SnapGear appliance line is available immediately through Secure Computing channel partners and OEMs worldwide and is comprised of six appliance models starting at $249 U.S. For more information, please visit the site.

[tags]SMB, network, security[/tags]