The Seattle, Washington-based company is driving hard into the UTM market, and Richard Reid, WatchGuard’s managing director for EMEA, claimed that latest market analysis suggests the vendor is making good headway.
The company produces firewall and VPN appliances targeted at three price points to appeal to the full range of the market, but concentrates most on meeting the needs of the small and medium-sized business sector. At the entry level it has its range of wired and wireless Firebox X Edge appliances, four models of the Firebox X Core midrange unit, and at the top end the 3 gigabit-per-second throughput Firebox X Peak.
During November it will be adding new anti-spam features provided by email security vendor Commtouch Software Inc. We looked at what the market had to offer and found that Commtouch produced the lowest rate of false-positives, but also uses an off-box database which relieves the firewall of processing the anti-spam routines. As email comes in it is instantly offloaded so that the performance of the WatchGuard box is unaffected, Reid said.
Commtouch has developed a system of recurrent pattern detection, and rather than evaluating possible spam by checking the message content, its technology analyzes large volumes of mail traffic in real time to identify outbreaks as soon as they emerge by comparing it with its database. Checking for patterns rather than content means the system is language-independent and so is well placed to be able to handle multi-national emails.
The additional anti-spam feature will be licensed at a price point that will start from $450 a year per device and will become available through WatchGuard’s channel partners.
The company also said it had separated the management function out from Firebox into a standalone console called WatchGuard System Manager, which can now manage both the existing and new range of firewalls, and the addition of IPS to the AV module for its firewalls. With a unified management console, administrators can update groups of Firebox X Edge appliances, view all appliances at a glance, and launch monitoring and configuration tools, the company said.
Improvements were also announced to the granularity with which the appliances handle instant message and peer-to-peer service traffic, allowing administrators to authorize or disable IM use by service vendor or application type. They can also start to view and sort signatures by ID to analyze the signature base more effectively. Web-blocking features have also been enhanced to check user access attempts against 40 categories of web site, up from 14.
