Last month the company announced plans for an ‘all in one’ appliance for small businesses and branch offices later this summer. That unit, the SG565 was described as an $859 appliance that includes firewall and VPN features, anti-virus and intrusion prevention, on top of a five-port wired/wireless switch. It also includes a USB port for file and print serving, and a two-link connection load balancer.
Yesterday it released details of another appliance, the SG580 unit, which consolidates firewall, intrusion-prevention, secure VPN access, anti-virus and web content filtering features on a single device. It is designed for use in central offices of small to medium-sized enterprises, as well as branch offices of large enterprises, the vendor said.
The SG580 appliance will begin shipping in June with anti-virus becoming available by September. John Doyle vice president, global marketing, at CyberGuard explained that the anti-virus addition will be based on the Clam-AV Linux-based GPL anti-virus toolkit for Unix. It will become available as a free upgrade to Version 3.1 of the firmware he said.
The main purpose of Clam-AV software is the integration with mail servers for attachment scanning. The package provides a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner, and a tool for automatic updating via internet. The programs are based on a shared library distributed with the Clam AntiVirus package. Most importantly, the virus database is kept bang up to date.
There are signs of a change in market preferences towards unified security platforms, driven by a shifting threat landscape, and by a prevailing need to cut infrastructure costs. Hackers are using hybrid threats, and are able to get around most standalone products. By converging security features such as IDS, intrusion prevention, firewalls, and anti-virus, security vendors hope to raise the enterprise security barrier.
Previously, integrated firewall and virtual private networking appliances have made up the biggest slice of the European market, generating in excess of 70% of the attributable revenues, with intrusion detection and prevention appliances holding a 20% share, and the latest U platforms claiming a 10% slice of unit shipments.
IDC says U appliances will show the strongest growth in the next few years, and exhibit a CAGR of 61% between 2004 and 2009. It estimates that by 2009, U will be the primary category, constituting about 50% of western European security appliance revenue.
