ESoft Fortifies UTM And Content Management Appliance Lines

ESoft has added a number of hardware upgrades to its InstaGate UTM platform and ThreatWall SCM platforms, including high-capacity SATA hard drives with RAID mirroring, hyperthreaded CPUs and faster memory, said Scott Lukes, vice president of marketing and product management at the Broomfield, Colo.-based company.

The upgrades allow the appliances to handle deep packet inspection, scanning of network traffic using both packet-based and proxy-based methods, and offer better protection against rootkits, worms and exploits that use instant messaging and Ajax-based Web applications, Lukes said.

ESoft gives customers two options for adding functionality to the platforms, according to Lukes. SoftPaks offer a la carte security features such as antivirus, antispam, antiphishing, mail-content filtering and Web-content filtering, while ThreatPaks offer comprehensive security for e-mail systems and network applications, Lukes said.

ESoft's SoftPak model creates opportunities for solution providers to give their customers the ability to add functionality to their existing hardware, said Chris Dunbar, president of Earthside, an Atlanta-based solution provider. For example, a small business that starts off with basic firewall functionality could grow to the point where it needed to monitor its employees' Web usage, he said.

"The SoftPak model makes sense because if a company buys one box, they can continue to upgrade that box," Dunbar said.

ESoft's Threat Prevention Lab gathers data from all its deployed appliances and leverages that information to provide better protection against emerging exploits, Lukes said.

Tying all of these features together from a management standpoint is ThreatMonitor, which is a graphical tool that gathers log data from deployed appliances and renders this data in charts, summaries and traffic profiles to give administrators a method of monitoring the security state of the network, Lukes said.

The InstaGate line starts at $1,999 for 150 Mbps firewall and 80 Mbps VPN. The ThreatWall line starts at $2,299 for a box that handles 7,500 e-mails per hour. Both are available now.