Sygate Unleashes Double Agent

The security vendor on Monday introduced Sygate Enterprise Protection (SEP) 5.0, software with device agents that do double duty by delivering both host intrusion prevention (HIP) and network access control (NAC) to millions of networked devices.

With SEP 5.0, Sygate takes the NAC tools it has traditionally offered and blends with them additional HIP tools that can help prevent, for example, unauthorized copying of files to removable media, such as USB storage devices or CD/DVD burners.

SEP 5.0 also improves security at the operating system, application and network layers by helping to prevent buffer overflow attacks, application vulnerabilities like unauthorized executable code, and network-based worms, said Jon Brody, vice president of marketing communications for the Fremont, Calif., company.

Brody said Sygate aimed to strike a balance between deploying security protections and the policies that optimize those protections. In most cases, companies need to add more policies to strike such a balance, he said.

"You have to take extra steps to protect the network, but then you have to take the incredibly massive step to make sure those [protective] steps are in place all the time," said Brody.

The single agent NAC/HIP approach will likely become the approach advocated by Sygate for all of its resellers and certain OEM partners, said Brody. But Sygate is aware that upgrading and redeploying agent-based architectures can present challenges, and the vendor intends to offer comprehensive migration paths to the single agent NAC/HIP technology "over time," said Brody.

Sygate has also beefed up the performance of SEP 5.0, yet still enables massive agent deployments to be managed through a single console, said Brody. As many as 700,000 users per server, and 2.5 million agents per company, can be managed with 5.0 -- numbers that reflect the significant, ongoing increase in IP-addressed devices that make up some networks. Networked devices "are on our person, they're in our cars, they are everywhere," Brody said.

Sygate, which has seen its reseller channel grow 300 percent in the last year, will offer specialized SEP training and sales and marketing materials to its security VARs worldwide, according to Sygate.

Pricing for 1,000 seats starts at $65 per seat for desktops and laptops, and $115 per seat for servers.