Sophos virtualises Web gateway protection
IT security and data protection company, Sophos, has announced the availability of Sophos Virtual Web Appliances, which provide complete web protection, streamlined management and broad deployment flexibility in virtual environments. Available for download via the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace (http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1225003), the new Virtual Web Appliances can be set up in minutes, and brings the company’s hardware security capabilities to businesses of any size.
“Virtualisation has helped organisations reduce capital and operating costs, and drive greater levels of application availability. It has also yielded benefits in terms of flexibility, agility and control,” says Brett Myroff, CEO of Sophos distributor, NetXactics.
Sophos has integrated its managed appliance experience to an on-premise managed service. Sophos Managed Appliances include remote monitoring and automated maintenance at no additional charge. This eliminates the need to manually schedule and apply updates and upgrades, while providing proactive monitoring and support.
Sophos Virtual Appliances also provide elastic scalability with the ability to provision, duplicate and move appliances within a virtualised infrastructure. Pre-configured performance profiles make deployment easier, and built-in load balancing allows several virtual appliances to work together for added capacity and redundancy, while being managed collectively as one. In addition, Sophos has invested in delivering an intuitive management console with 3-clicks-to-anywhere task-oriented navigation and policy wizards.
“By integrating Web Appliance protection with its Endpoint solution, Sophos delivers protection and management visibility into users’ web activity—wherever they go. Administrators can quickly and easily set policies, report on activity and protect users beyond the secure perimeter of the corporate network. This is all possible without the need for costly and complex backhauling or added gateway infrastructure,” Myroff says.
Sophos’s three-stage filter combines URL reputation filtering, advanced real-time malware scanning with behavioral analysis and content control to guard against the latest threats. The Sophos appliances also include HTTPS scanning, dynamic anonymising proxy blocking and call home detection to cover essential blind-spots.
“Organisations are increasingly looking to squeeze more out of less by further leveraging their investment in virtualisation, but simply implementing virtualised versions of the same maintenance-heavy applications only helps to a limited extent,” says Myroff. “Sophos’s Virtual Web Appliance allows IT departments to leverage the benefits of virtualisation as well as those of a managed service, while keeping their data on-premise and preserving complete control.”
Trials are available free of charge and licensing is based on a per user, per year fee with no additional charges for the number of virtual servers.
