Corporate Guardian Keeps Both Networks, Users Safe

While at first blush, that may sound restrictive, the product actually protects end users from nefarious Web-based schemes and reduces exposure to liability generated from inappropriate content.

System integrators will like the flexibility the product offers. It is built around a hardened Linux operating system and includes all necessary software components to build a traffic filtering system. Integrators can quickly build their own "appliance" for resale. The hardware requirements are relatively light, driven more by bandwidth factors than processing power. An integrator could build a basic appliance for a small business based on little more than a 1GHz Pentium processor, 256 Mbytes of RAM and 6 Gbytes of hard-disk space.

Installation is wizard-driven and pretty much automated. As long as an installer sticks to the hardware compatibility list, there should be no problems with the initial setup.

Corporate Guardian 5's real power comes from its filtering and reporting capabilities. Most products on the market filter based on a Web address and not actual content. SmoothWall instead uses a proprietary technology named dynamic content analysis, which caches users' page requests via proxy technology and then examines and grades the content before forwarding it to the end user.

Priced according to user count, the product is rounded out by its logging and reporting capabilities. Administrators can generate reports to find out who has requested what from where and when. That proves to be a powerful management tool for judging bandwidth requirements and adjusting access policies.

While the company is relatively new to the U.S. market, extensive work has gone into developing a partner-friendly channel program. SmoothWall has broken the program into four tiers: Base, Bronze, Silver and Gold. Overall, the channel program proves to be flexible and offers ample rewards that directly correlate to partner commitment.