NetScreen Service Offers Deeper Level Of Protection
The Sunnyvale, Calif., security appliance vendor also introduced its 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 [operating system] 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. "The Deep Inspection Firewall looks 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."
SECURITY BUILDUP AT NETSCREEN
>> OCTOBER 6: Acquires Neoteris for $265 million, gaining Neoteris' SSL VPN appliances.
>> OCTOBER 20: Unveils the Deep Inspection Firewall service
for $495 per box.
>> DECEMBER: Plans to release the Security Management Platform, starting at $5,995 for 10 devices and scaling up to $55,995 for 1,000 devices.
The idea is to put the deep-inspection capabilities into the firewall so attacks can be stopped at the gateway and prevented from propagating within the network infrastructure, Flynn said. "This is a huge problem that customers are wrestling with," he added.
Channel partners can offer the Deep Inspection Firewall service, launched this month, as a stand-alone service and receive annual recurring revenue, according to NetScreen. Each NetScreen box carries a list price of $495. On top of margin points on the product, partners can receive a percentage of the $75-a-year charge for a service that delivers weekly updates on attack patterns. The subscription ranges from 5 percent to 10 percent of the hardware price.
"There's a big transition in the marketplace in terms of moving from intrusion detection to intrusion prevention, and I like the fact that with this service we're not required to buy another device to do intrusion prevention," said Brent Gardner, network security engineer at ICG Communications, Englewood, Colo., one of the partners beta-testing the Deep Inspection Firewall service. "We're also interested in the product because of its [Session Initiation Protocol] support and deep packet-inspection capabilities."
ICG is mulling plans to offer a managed firewall service and may integrate Deep Inspection Firewall into the offering, he said.
NetScreen's Security Management Platform, slated for availability in December, starts at $5,995 for 10 devices and scales up to $55,995 for 1,000 devices.