NetScreen Intros Deep Inspection Firewall And New Security Management Platform
The security appliance vendor also introduced the Security Management Platform, designed to manage hardware and hardware health, network level configurations and security policies.
"The Deep Inspection Firewall is the next major enhancement to our Screen OS software, and it's very important because it's taking security up to a whole other level," said David Flynn, vice president of marketing at, NetScreen, Sunnyvale, Calif. "The Deep Inspection Firewall looks much, much deeper into the traffic flows to provide protection against application level attacks vs. just network level access. This is designed to protect against worms and other application level attacks that are floating around."
The idea is to put the Deep Inspection capabilities into the firewall so attacks can be stopped at the gateway and prevented from propagating the network infrastructure.
"This is a huge problem customers are wrestling with, and the integration of this into traditional firewalls is going to be a fundamental transformation in the network security industry," he said.
Channel partners can offer the Deep Inspection Firewall service as a stand-alone service and receive yearly recurring revenue, according to the vendor. Each NetScreen box carries a list price of $495. Partners can receive a percentage of the $75-a-year charge for a service that delivers weekly updates on attack patterns on top of margin points on the product. The subscription ranges from 5 percent to 10 percent of the hardware purchase price.
The Security Management Platform, which will be available in December, starts at $5,995 for 10 devices and scales up to $55,995 for 1,000 devices.
"From a channel angle, the Security Management Platform can be used to deliver managed services," said Flynn. "So if they want to spin out their own managed services for customers, the platform can be portioned into multiple domains with each domain serving a different customer with a different service."