London, UK – July 7, 2010 – Stonesoft an innovative provider of integrated network security and business continuity solutions, today announced the availability of the StoneGate Firewall/VPN 5.2, IPS 5.2 and StoneGate Management Centre 5.2. The new version offers a wide range of usability and performance enhancements that streamline the network administrators’ workflows as well as reduce the total cost of ownership.
The StoneGate 5.2 solution, comprising of the StoneGate Firewall/VPN, StoneGate IPS and StoneGate Management Centre, takes network security management to a new level, offering a range of enhancements in policies, monitoring, logging and system administration as well as improvements in security and network integration. This automates many basic day-to-day tasks and allows network administrators to focus on fighting against new threats and deviations from regular traffic patterns.
Reducing downtime to the minimum
“Studies show that most of the security incidents are a result of human error. Incidents result in downtime, loss of productivity and additional clean up costs. With the usability enhancements offered by StoneGate 5.2 we minimise, or even eliminate the possibility of human error. All Stonesoft products are designed with 24/7 availability in mind and now we can also significantly lower human error rate and therefore reduce network downtime to the minimum. I believe that with StoneGate 5.2, we have once again raised the bar”, said Klaus Majewski, vice president of Marketing at Stonesoft.
StoneGate IPS 5.2. offers improvements in performance and new fingerprinting. The daily management of intrusion prevention has been made more efficient and intuitive, which reduces administrative workload, saves costs and decreases the risk of human errors. In security configuration policy, the improved inspection configuration allows the administrator to easily see what threat protections are available and currently enabled. Convenient shortcuts in the logs allow the administrator to quickly eliminate false positives.
Usability is the key to lower operational costs
Enhancements in network administrators’ workflows in StoneGate Management Centre make the management of large network environments easier and more cost-efficient than ever before. For example, the new type ahead search allows administrators to find the correct elements fast and effortlessly in any context.
The Network Address Translation (NAT) rule links from the logs and NAT counters help administrators to find correct NAT rule entries that created those log entries and see if specific NAT rules are never used. This way unnecessary or unused rules can be deleted and thus the configuration rulebase kept simple and usable. These kinds of usability enhancements make the administrator’s work more efficient.
Monitoring allows setting alert thresholds, keeping the administrator informed 24/7 about recent anomalies detected in the environment. Additional enhancements include integrated whois queries as well as appliance and geolocation status diagrams that show immediately and in very illustrative way where the anomalies originate from.
Always-on mentality
The new StoneGate also offers efficient protection against Denial of Service attacks (DoS/DDoS). The network administrator can now limit the number of concurrent connections per destination and/or source IP address.
In addition, multicast handling has been improved through the introduction of a IGMP proxy configuration option and the new link aggregation feature allows aggregating multiple physical interfaces as one, which brings a fully fault-tolerant, robust and flexible firewall cluster.
