How secure is your network? Two Australian experts -- Sven Radavics, country manager, WatchGuard Australia and Tim Dickinson, country manager, SonicWALL Australia -- compare notes on their offerings.
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Radavics: What do you believe are the key limitations of today's firewall solutions?
Dickinson: These days having a firewall is simply not enough and when it comes to choosing a security solution provider, we strongly encourage customers to focus on the convergent elements offered by vendors and to have something that can support key business applications. That means making sure their solution:
- supports VoIP
- provides deep packet inspection (being able to interrogate the whole data packet not just the headers)
- is easy to manage
- has no limitation on throughput
- ensures low total cost of ownership
- offers the option to outsource security management to a specialist provider.
Radavics: Everything should always start with a solid security policy whose goal is to support the network and IT business requirements. Without this you are only buying product, not a solution.
At the gateway, we recommend using a fully integrated security appliance with zero-day protection and intelligent layered security. Many SMBs try to implement security systems by mixing disparate point solutions from several vendors. These products must all be purchased, installed, managed, and updated separately.
This approach generates difficulties with interoperability, incomplete protection, and time-consuming testing and verifying patches across multiple technologies, all of which can slow a network's response to attacks. Organisations should also implement architectures that incorporate intrusion prevention to inspect and block traffic at the application layer, and enable access and activity to be controlled by the user and not just by the IP address.
Customers should implement a solution which provides rich reporting, real-time monitoring, and multi-box management. For example, historical HTML-based reports can provide analysis of trends, while interactive, real-time monitoring tools allow IT managers to instantly identify problems and take preventive or corrective action to stop network threats.
Radavics:
What prevents SonicWALL from closing a sale?
Dickinson:
Our biggest challenge is getting potential customers to understand the full extent of dynamic threats and to accept that having a firewall is not enough. Once they appreciate this, they understand the importance of choosing a vendor like SonicWALL, which has built its product set around dynamic security management.
Dickinson:
How does WatchGuard protect customers using VoIP from things like spam over Internet telephony?
Radavics:
The issue of spam over Internet telephony is today largely a theoretical one as VoIP right now is primarily deployed within companies rather than being used for external communications. While development of additional security for VoIP is important for us, WatchGuard prefers to concentrate in the short term on the larger problem of zero-day protection. Our Deep Application Inspection technology achieves this while the majority of our competitors rely solely on reactive signature-based technologies which leave the user unprotected for the critical first few hours of an outbreak.
Radavics:
In the late 1990s, there was a cliché that no MIS manager ever got fired for buying Cisco. Do you believe the situation has changed since then?
Dickinson:
IT managers typically work for companies on a two to three year cycle. When they move to a new company they conduct an assessment to determine the best network security solution to meet a company's needs. At that time they tend to choose the best product for the job. In network security it's not about buying a brand, it's about buying the best solution to meet the current security threats and business operation requirements of the company. A well-known brand doesn't stop your company being under threat and IT managers are far more discerning about the choices they make these days.
no they do not, they have hacked me, said all kinds of nasty things to me, called me names,chased me all over every chat room i have been in , yahoo, pay pal,aol. it dose not matter, they hacked my phone, my life and broke into my house, sent messages threatening me,called my family everything you can think of,and got into my finaces, tapped my tel,sent blacklist sites.
vickielmeadows2000@yaho.com or meadvck@aol.com,victorialynn48@yahoo.com