Secure Computing launches firewall Sidewinder 7.0 in Middle East

Secure Computing Corporation, a leader in enterprise gateway security, has announced the Middle East launch of Sidewinder 7.0, the industry’s first firewall to incorporate reputation technology to provide proactive and reliable protection. It also includes significant enhancements for performance, policy management and overall security.

Sidewinder 7.0 incorporates global intelligence from the company’s industry-leading reputation system, TrustedSource. Like a credit agency provides credit scores to enable reliable commerce, TrustedSource provides reputation scores for IPs, domains and URLs. Using this real-time scoring, Sidewinder 7.0 allows organisations to drop connections from malicious sources in order to prevent security threats such as spam and phishing, reclaim bandwidth and reduce downstream server processing.

“There are many unified threat management and firewall products on the market. However, there is a difference between products that provide basic protection versus those that deliver a complete solution,” said Charles Kolodgy, research director at IDC. “As enterprises realize there are many malicious IP senders, they are also recognizing that identifying these bad IP addresses is vital to overall security.”

Enterprises use Sidewinder to manage access to their networks and protect Internet-facing applications, as well as to monitor and manage employee use of the Internet, identify hidden attacks in packet streams, block viruses in file transfers, and create a forensic-quality audit trail to assist with regulatory compliance and reporting.

“The availability of Sidewinder 7.0 in the Middle East will be a welcome development for the region’s business community as organisations can no longer sit back and rely solely on reactive technologies to keep looming threats outside of the network,” said Sami Mulla, Director, Middle East, Secure Computing. “Security needs to be multi-layered with integrated, best-of-breed offerings. We are confident that reputation will be critical in ensuring organisations are protected as threats dynamically evolve.”