Data center News
CRN's 2018 Products Of The Year
Kyle Alspach
SECURITY-NETWORK
SOPHOS XG FIREWALL UPDATES
WINNER: OVERALL
Sophos XG Firewall Version 17 stands out by filling gaps in areas that firewalls traditionally have lacked visibility or capability around. A marquee feature is the new Synchronized App Control capability, which leverages information from the endpoint to classify previously unclassified network traffic and applications through the firewall. Sam Heard, president of Lakeland, Fla.-based Data Integrity Services, said Synchronized App Control helps fill a gap for customers around application classification. “That feature will be a game-changer,” Heard said. “I don’t think anyone else can do what they are doing with the endpoint and the firewall.”
Subcategory Winner—Technology: Fortinet FortiOS 6.0
Fortinet’s FortiOS 6.0 offers centralized management across the entire portfolio from a management analytics and SIEM perspective. The company’s SD-WAN toolset leverages path-aware intelligence to ensure customers are getting appropriate service to crucial applications. FortiOS 6.0 also expands its cloud connectors to include visibility into private, public and SaaS clouds.
Subcategory Winner—Customer Demand: Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS 8.1
Recent enhancements in PAN-OS 8.1 from Palo Alto Networks include key capabilities such as easier adoption of SSL-decryption in multivendor environments; simplified management and operations for large, distributed deployments; advanced threat detection and prevention; and collection of rich data for analytics.
Finalist: Cisco Meraki Insight
Leveraging advanced technologies in deep packet inspection and network performance monitoring, Cisco Meraki Insight enhances the security of networks by enabling IT administrators to more quickly isolate network or application problems that originate outside the local-area network.
Finalist: Forcepoint Dynamic Data Protection
Through leveraging human-centric behavior analytics, Forcepoint Dynamic Data Protection continuously assesses risk and automatically provides proportional enforcement that can be dialed up or down. The product’s automated enforcement capabilities ultimately free up security analysts to focus on higher-value activities.
