Check Point Soups Up Management Tool

Check Point Software Technologies this week plans to roll out a new version of its security management solution for service providers and large enterprises.

Provider-1 Next Generation is another component of Check Point's next-

generation security suite, which the company shipped this summer.

The product offers streamlined administrative capabilities and new redundancy features designed to make it easier for MSPs and enterprises to manage Check Point firewalls and VPNs, said executives at the Redwood City-based company.

Provider-1 Next Generation aims to provide MSPs with a flexible solution that allows them to scale their businesses, said Mike Lee, Check Point product marketing manager.

"If they can serve more customers and spread their costs across more customers, they're going to be more profitable and more competitive," he said.

Kevin Dowd, president of operations at Integralis U.S., an East Hartford, Conn.-based systems integrator, said Provider-1 Next Generation makes sense for enterprise customers. Integralis doesn't use the software on the managed security side of its business, Dowd said. Rather, the company advises enterprise customers to keep management capability in-house to make it easier for them to control in the event that they're cut off from their service provider, he said.

The new version of Provider-1 Next Generation features Total Availability Management, which provides management server redundancy by ensuring that globally distributed servers back each other up via automatic synchronization of data, said Check Point's Lee.

Another feature allows network administrators or MSPs to create policies and push them out to their entire customer base, Lee said. For example, administrators could push out a policy to

protect all of their customers from a security threat such as Code Red, he said.

Other features include advanced log file management, automatic software and license updates and the ability to track administrator policy changes.

Pricing for Provider-1 Next Generation starts

at $40,000.