firewall

McAfee today announced that it has upgraded its enterprise firewall products with new capabilities that help customers increase network security and lower their compliance and operational costs in both physical and virtual network environments. The products, McAfee Firewall Enterprise (formerly Sidewinder), McAfee Firewall Enterprise Control Center and McAfee Firewall Enterprise Profiler also feature streamlined management through integration with McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator software and leverage McAfee global threat intelligence to provide world class protection.

Today, McAfee Firewall Enterprise protects more than 15,000 customers worldwide including thousands of government agencies, Fortune 500 organizations, and seven of the top ten financial institutions. By deploying these next generation capabilities, customers will lower ongoing management costs.

Next generation capabilities include significant advancements in firewall management, hybrid delivery options and integrated layers of threat protection. With the addition of McAfee Firewall Profiler, McAfee Firewall Enterprise is application and identity aware. McAfee Firewall Enterprise is the first and only firewall to use a global reputation-based technology, including TrustedSource reputation and geo-location to filter unwanted traffic before it hits the network—stopping attacks before they happen.

McAfee Firewall Profiler is a revolutionary new capability that pinpoints in real-time how firewalls rules and rule changes impact application availability, usage and security. Profiler turns hours and days of rule creation deployment and troubleshooting work into a matter of clicks by providing administrators visibility into the business impact of rule changes. By providing an intuitive visual context based on users and applications, Profiler reduces the impact of creating or changing specific rules and helps firewall administrators implement new policies and respond rapidly to business needs.

The revised version of Control Center and Firewall Reporter dramatically simplify management of multiple firewalls and enable more accurate audit and compliance reports. Both Profiler and Control Center now integrate with McAfee ePO software. Firewall Control Center now provides ePO software with firewall health data and reports for each firewall.

McAfee Firewall Enterprise is now available in traditional appliance form factors, in a new virtualized hardware appliance and as a software-based firewall virtual appliance. These new delivery options allow customers to take advantage of virtualization technologies to lower cost and increase flexibility when consolidating datacenter and application environments and when bringing up new virtual environments.

McAfee Firewall Enterprise appliances are available today, starting at $4,900 USD. Exact pricing depends on customer requirements, selected model and associated add-on modules. The McAfee Firewall Enterprise Virtual Appliance is priced at $4900 per VMWare ESX instance. McAfee Firewall Profiler appliance starts at $19,500 USD and Firewall Enterprise Control Center starts at $6,900 USD.

Altor Networks today announced the availability of the Altor VF (Virtual Firewall), and announced its certified integration with products from ArcSight, Juniper Networks, Mazu Networks and VMware.

The Altor VF is a software security appliance that runs in a virtualized environment and enforces security policy on a per virtual machine (VM) basis. Unlike existing firewalls designed for physical networks, the Altor VF virtual firewall can secure Live Migration – a technology designed to trigger automatic movement of VMs across physical servers, but capable of inadvertently moving an application to a less trusted network. The Altor VF was purpose-built for the virtual environment – enabling tighter security policy and greater ease-of-use than existing virtual firewalls adapted from their physical firewall counterparts.

The Altor VF extends the functionality of traditional firewalls. Traditional firewalls not only provide security to physical networks, they also provide visibility to the traffic running through them and export some of that data to 3rd party products to aggregate and correlate data across the network. However, traditional firewalls cannot see into the virtual environment. The Altor VF extends visibility into the virtual environment – providing NetFlow statistics, Sys Log, and other network statistics on a per application basis and exporting that data to 3rd party products such as those from ArcSight and Mazu Networks (Please see separate releases for details).

Similarly, in existing physical networks, some companies also employ an Intrusion Detection & Prevention System (IDS/IPS) to further secure their physical networks. Through its partnership with Juniper Networks, the Altor VF enables Juniper IDP appliances to extend their protection into the virtual environment (Please see separate releases for details).

The Altor VF brings to market a number of industry firsts to dramatically improve virtual network security management:

— VirtualCenter Integration — The Altor VF includes out-of-the-box integration with VMware’s VirtualCenter, enabling the automated deployment of virtual firewalls on ESX hosts. The product further applies a default policy to all new virtual machines — helping control virtual machine sprawl.

— Security Policy per Virtual Machine — VMs on a virtual server can serve different purposes — ranging from development and test to various types of production applications. The Altor VF locks down each VM to its specified use, insuring no communication among VMs with mixed application trust levels.

— Support for Live Migration — When VMotion moves a VM to a different physical host, the Altor VF ensures that its security policy and active sessions move along with it. Therefore, companies can obtain the full benefits of Live Migration while maintaining security within their virtual network.

The Altor VF is available immediately with prices ranging between $1,500 and $2,000 per server depending on volume.

Altor Networks

McAfee Introduces New Enterprise Firewall Solutions

Altor Networks Introduces Virtual Firewall, Integrates With ArcSight, Juniper, Mazu and VMware