Appliance approach secures Australian blue chips

Beverley Head
Monday, 25 October 2010 13:10

Business IT - Security

Target, Tennis Australia and the University of Queensland are among 50 Australian organisations which have bought network appliances and security solutions from Palo Alto Networks since it began selling systems three years ago.

Founded in 2005 to respond to a changing threat landscape, Palo Alto Networks has developed a system which funnels internet traffic entering or leaving an organisation through a network appliance.

According to Rene Bonvanie, vice president of the company, who was recently in Australia, the appliance was developed in response to the belief that while so called stateful inspection - which monitors and classifies internet traffic and either allows or disallows access based on that classification - had worked successfully for many years, it was no longer sufficient protection given the proliferation of applications now on the internet.

Stateful inspection worked when internet users were browsing websites according to Mr Bonvanie, but; 'Now there are thousands of apps on the internet that are browser based and get around network security,' he said. At the same time 'users are smart about trying to get out' of corporate networks and regularly breach firewalls in order to access online applications that they found useful in their private lives.

Palo Alto Networks' technology uses application identification technology that classifies traffic based on the application; permits control of application use by individual users; and performs content inspection.

'We put the appliance in the network and that manages all the traffic out and in. It can do high volumes of traffic and high volumes of users at high speed,' said Mr Bonvanie.

The appliance is policy controlled, so for example in a university environment it is possible for administrators to set different levels of access for different levels of users.

'In the university you have research, faculty and students, three kinds of profiles, and you may set very different policy for what students and faculty can do with Facebook. Facebook has risks both ways - it has become a vector for bad things to get in, but also a leak for information for people using Facebook chat or email.