New Enterprise Messaging and Content-security Solutions Unveiled by WatchGuard

Wednesday, 18 November 2009 08:43

'Enterprise organisations face a myriad of security challenges due to the ever-increasing threat landscape and deluge of new and complex regulatory and compliance requirements,' said Eric Aarrestad, Vice President of Marketing, WatchGuard Technologies.  'With WatchGuard XCS solutions in place, enterprises gain a fail-safe, defence-in-depth platform that provides unified and holistic messaging and content security that protects against next-generation threats, as well as an easy-to-use, yet extremely powerful foundation for message and web-content management and control.'

Designed and optimised for networks with 1,000 to 10,000 or more users, the WatchGuard XCS 770, 970 and 1170 series of appliances offer unparallelled performance, efficacy and reliability.  Leveraging an advanced anti-spam engine that examines sender information and content - including images, attachments and embedded URLs - these appliances can conduct contextual analysis of message traffic for a categorised and weighted score, which results in highly intelligent and accurate protection.

For additional control, administrators will appreciate the built-in quarantine for spam and suspect emails, which directs unwanted messages to a local quarantine server, allowing end users to manage their quarantined messages, safe lists and block lists from an easy-to-use web-based interface.

Addressing the ever-growing threat of blended threats and malware, the WatchGuard XCS 770, 970 and 1170 series provide zero-hour threat outbreak response as well as advanced content filtering and malware protection, which scans inbound as well as outbound emails for malicious content.

Given that mid-tier and enterprise organisations face a litany of regulatory and compliance requirements, the WatchGuard XCS 770, 970 and 1170 all include sophisticated data-loss prevention features - such as transparent remediation to automatically block, quarantine, re-route, blind copy, encrypt or allow messages based on configurable policies, as well as pre-defined compliance dictionaries for GLB, HIPAA, PCI DSS and others to make administration as easy as possible.  Seamless email encryption secures confidential messages to any recipient without requiring a dedicated server; thus, avoiding the costs associated with most encryption solutions.  Furthermore, e-profiling and data discovery and classification allows administrators to classify types of sensitive data, and with centralised data-loss policy management, administrators can apply single policies across multiple protocols to protect data-in-motion from loss and policy violations.

For additional redundancy, scalability and maximum uptime, the WatchGuard XCS 770, 970 and 1170 appliances come with dynamic on-demand clustering and queue replication - which provides easy replication of configuration settings and messaging queues across multiple systems in minutes, as well as message-level redundancy, which ensures no communication is ever lost and that email security is always up and running.

Like all other WatchGuard XCS appliances, the XCS 770, 970 and 1170 can also take advantage of WatchGuard's innovative in-the-cloud security technology, ReputationAuthority.  With 99.99 per cent accuracy, ReputationAuthority eliminates up to 98.3 per cent of spam email before it ever gets to the network by using DNS blacklists, IP volume, behaviour analysis and content inspection.  Given that spam email is a major carrier of viruses, phishing attempts and blended threats, WatchGuard's defence-in-depth architecture with ReputationAuthority, pre-screens and eliminates this unwanted traffic - better protecting business networks, applications and data.

Enterprises can leverage the WatchGuard XCS 770, 970 or 1170 to also provide defence-in-depth web-content protection.  To reduce exposure to web-based threats, administrators can invoke acceptable use and application controls to centrally manage and restrict internet and application usage with granular policies for users and groups.  URL filtering and categorisation dynamically analyses and blocks access to websites based on content policies.  With dynamic inspection, real-time content examination and analysis occurring on every web page that enters the network, and with web traffic enhancements, organisations can reduce bandwidth consumption, server loads and web-traffic latency.

Pricing and Availability
The WatchGuard XCS series of appliances will be available worldwide from WatchGuard channel partners within 30 days.  More information is available at www.watchguard.com.

About WatchGuard Technologies, Inc.

Since 1996, WatchGuard® Technologies, Inc. has been the advanced technology leader of network-security solutions, providing mission-critical security to hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. The WatchGuard family of wired and wireless unified threat management (UTM) appliances and WatchGuard SSL VPN remote-access solutions provide extensible network security, unparallelled network visibility, management and control. WatchGuard products are backed by WatchGuard LiveSecurity® Service - an innovative support, maintenance, and education programme. WatchGuard is headquartered in Seattle, Washington and has its Asia Pacific regional headquarters in Singapore, with other offices in Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo. To learn more, visit www.watchguard.com.

WatchGuard, Firebox, LiveSecurity, BorderWare, SteelGate and ReputationAuthority are either registered trademarks or trademarks of WatchGuard Technologies, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.