Cisco Systems Inc is taking its firewall offerings down to the low-end with the addition of its Centri Firewall to its network security product line. The Windows NT-based Centri Firewall version 4.0 is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses and includes features that simplify security policy setting, says Cisco. The Natural Network Viewer and Policy Builder modules allow security policies to be applied to NT domains, users, groups, individual machines, or to groups of machines residing in defined physical or logical networks. It also comes with pre- configured support for network applications and services, including transparent support for all common TCP/IP applications, such as WWW, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Telnet and Mail. Additional features include ActiveX, Java applet, JavaScript, VBscript and URL blocking; port address translation; network address translation; proxy security services for web, Telnet, and FTP; and support for multimedia applications including RealAudio, NetMeeting, CoolTalk, H.323 and VDOLive. According to Cisco the Centri graphical user interface will be used across the its firewall product line which currently includes the Cisco PIX Firewall. The Cisco Centri Firewall is available now and its pricing is based on the number of network users. Three user levels are available: 100, 250 and up to 500 users. For a 100- user solution, the price is $3,500; for 250 users, the price is $5,000 and up to 500 users it is $7,500.
