The infosec vendor, headquartered in Redwood City, California, uses the name Unified Threat Management (UTM) for its multi-function offerings, a term created by analyst firm IDC and originally applied to more SME offerings from the likes of Fortinet and SonicWALL.
Check Point’s entry into the product class was with a mid-market offering all in software, the so-called VPN-1 UTM, consisting of a firewall, IPsec VPN and IDS/IPS, all its own technology, plus anti-virus from CA, recalled its UK security engineer manager Caroline Ikomi. The UTM-1 range launched today is the next generation of that product, with additional features as well as in an appliance format.
The new features are anti-spam and anti-spyware, with URL filtering from Surfcontrol to be added at the end of February, as well as SSL termination. The appliance models are the UTM-1 450, a four-port device with a US list price of $7,500 and a target of companies with around 250 users; the 1050, an eight-port with a list price of $12,500 and targeted at companies around the 500-user mark, and the $15,500 2050, another eight-port device with a target market in the 1,000-user range.
All three prices relate to the appliance with basic security functionality, though of course some of the services such as AV, AS and ASpy require updates in terms of signatures or blacklists, and for these there is a separate, all-encompassing license fee that covers them all. On top of that is SSL, where you will pay licenses for the individual clients, Ikomi went on. The hardware platform is an Intel X.86 architecture running a Linux kernel.
Nick Lowe, managing director for Check Point Northern Europe, said part of the ethos behind the development of these devices was to address the mid-market’s requirement for ease of deployment and management.
For this reason there is no need for a separate management station, he said. The management is all included on the box.
Equally, the appliances ship with a USB dongle such that, if someone makes a mistake in configuring them, they can be returned to factory settings by plugging the dongle in and clicking on it in the browser-based Web management tool.
