With an eye towards helping small and medium-size businesses contain costs associated with implementing up-to-date security technology, Symantec Corp. Tuesday unveiled its Symantec Gateway Security appliance which combines intrusion detection, a firewall, antivirus software and other security technologies into a single box.
The device, which was announced at the RSA Conference 2002 security show, is designed to sit between a corporate network and the Internet, with all traffic running through the appliance, according to Barry Cioe, director of product management at Symantec. The Gateway Security appliance offers users intrusion detection, a firewall, antivirus software, virtual private networking (VPN) and content filtering for all incoming traffic, he said.
When network traffic is sent through the device, it is first inspected by the intrusion detection component of the device, then the firewall, then the antivirus software, Cioe said. The appliance allows for gateway-to-gateway virtual private networking and maintains a list of Web sites that users behind the device are blocked from visiting, Cioe said. Administrators can add and remove Web sites from that list as they see fit, he added.
Users can also add redundancy, client-to-gateway VPN support that allows remote workers to connect to the device using a VPN, and load-balancing features to the device for an additional fee, he said.
Symantec Gateway Security also offers reports, a single management console running on Windows NT/2000 for all five components, and alerts that can be sent via pager or e-mail, he added.
The device is targeted at small and medium-size companies and can support between 50 and 1,000 systems behind each appliance, Cioe said.
Companies this size will be drawn to the device because it offers five products they need in one appliance, he said.
“This product was designed and tailored around sites that have less IT staff,” he said.
The Gateway Security appliance comes in three models, all of which will be available worldwide on March 15. The 5110, the low-end model, supports up to 50 users, offers 40M-bits per second of traffic and has a suggested retail price of US$11,790. The 5200 supports 250 users, can handle 80M-bits per second of traffic and costs $18,000. The high-end box, the 5300, allows an unlimited number of users, though Symantec suggests as many as 1,000 users; offers 80M-bits per second of throughput, and costs $43,000.
Symantec Corp., based in Cupertino, Calif., is at http://www.symantec.com/.
