Solution Providers Give Rave Reviews To Check Point's Interspect Tool

Just three months after the security vendor unveiled its InterSpect security appliance, VARs and other solution providers are extolling the device as the best thing to hit the industry since the firewall itself.

Redwood Shores, Calif.-based Check Point released InterSpect in January, billing the tool as an internal security gateway. So far, resellers said the product has been just that, providing them with the opportunities to block worms, quarantine suspicious computers, segment internal networks, protect LAN protocols and proactively protect against attacks in one device.

"So many people have gotten hurt so badly over the last few years, I think this product enables everyone to breathe a little easier," said Brad Reed, director of Internet security at Compuquip, a Check Point partner in Miami. "If you ask me, [InterSpect] is simply the best thing on the market today."

Reed added that the key to InterSpect's success is its multifaceted approach. The product can be set up to operate in three different modes: Bridge, Switch or Router. In Bridge mode, InterSpect bridges one or more network segments to the network backbone and enables transparent deployment of segmentation and worm defense. In Switch mode, the appliance acts as a multiport bridge in which all ports are bridged together to make one zone. In Router mode, InterSpect acts as a router and configures every active port with a different IP address.

This last feature enables sophisticated network zone segmentation for multiple security zones, said Mark Kraynak, manager of product marketing at Check Point. "The product takes existing technologies and applies them to internal security in a way that's deployable and useful," he said, noting that Check Point's flagship Firewall-1 and VPN-1 products fail to address internal issues. "Firewall-1 was built for perimeter security, but our more mainstream customers need a product like InterSpect to fill in the gaps."

Pete Venuta, vice president of sales and marketing at Information Security Technology, St. Paul, Minn., said the solution gives his company the ability to meet customer needs inside and outside of the firewall. "We've seen customers who plug it in and 20 minutes later are finding things that their traditional [intrusion-detection] and [intrusion-prevention] solutions have not found," Venuta said. "From a security perspective, when you take the old perimeter tools and add in a product we apply to multitiered and multilayered networks, there's nobody you can't serve."