St. Bernard Upgrades Net Filtering Appliance

In addition to monitoring and blocking of sites, iPrism 3.2 offers customization of Internet access policies, comprehensive reporting features, integration with Cisco routers, remote browser-based management and realtime e-mail alerts that notify administrators when certain Web addresses are accessed or when bandwidth/time thresholds are reached.

The upgrade comes at a time when companies are looking for protection from harassment lawsuits sparked by employees looking at pornographic or hate sites, said Farley Stewart, vice president of Internet appliance products at St. Bernard. The iPrism appliance updates a 60-category database of objectionable or non-business-related sites every day. The updates are sold on a subscription basis, which can serve as an annuity for solution providers, Stewart said.

"Where the security industry is somewhat depressed, filtering is still pretty hot and therefore attractive to VARs," he said.

Lee Itzhaki, product manager at St. Bernard, based here, said appliance-based Internet filtering has a lower total cost of ownership than software filtering because the appliance simply attaches to the network. The iPrism also automatically adjusts to new network topology.

Marty Troup, vice president of Technology's Edge, Irvine, Calif., agrees appliances are the best way to filter. "I'm a big fan of appliances over infrastructure integration, mainly for maintenance reasons," he said.

While most customers think of Internet monitoring only for blocking users from prohibited sites, Troup said, products such as iPrism can also be used to pinpoint a network activity and flag bandwidth hogs.

Troup said he recently discovered that a customer's 40-user remote office was using an abnormal amount of bandwidth, and he used iPrism to track the problem to an officewide screen saver set to download a 1-Mbyte image every five minutes, which was chewing up 18 percent to 20 percent of the bandwidth.

The iPrism costs $2,195, and an additional $3,295 for a one-year, 250-user subscription plan that includes daily database updates, upgrades, technical support and hardware maintenance.