Network Gateway Security Solutions from SECURE COMPUTING®
Network Gateway Versatility

Secure Computing's Sidewinder® is the world's strongest firewall, with the most comprehensive set of security tools for establishing network gateway security. Securing the network has always been vital to the well-being of the enterprise, but today it is even more important. Network gateway security today protects against numerous complex threats that were not even conceived of a few years ago, and it also protects a much larger and more widely dispersed enterprise. Today, even smaller businesses are expanding their boundaries with teleworking, VPN services and other remote options for connecting employees, branch offices, partners and clients directly to the network.

Secure Computing takes a positive security model approach to network gateway security, by ensuring that only traffic that is explicitly permitted to cross the threshold, reaches the inner network. Security experts universally recommend this approach, which is far superior to the negative security model that allows everything to pass unless it has been explicitly marked ahead of time as being unwelcome. The older model may have worked in the early days of networking when threats were minimal, but today's network gateway security requires a stronger approach. In fact, many threats that could harm the network are not yet known.

The ability to proactively keep out attacks that are not yet known is the basis of Sidewinder's network gateway security model. Standard techniques such as blacklists and signature databases are of course, an important part of the security infrastructure, but they are useful only in keeping out attacks that have already been identified and catalogued. Sidewinder's battery of security tools includes many such tools that have the most extensive and accurate databases and signature lists in the industry, but Sidewinder's network gateway security model does not stop there. Reputation-based security provides an essential first line of defense with TrustedSource®, a high-speed filtering service that automatically discards large volumes of nuisance and potentially dangerous traffic coming from known bad sources.

Sidewinder's network gateway security model is an application-layer technology, which means that it operates at the highest layer of the OSI model. Older packet filtering firewall technologies are effective only against certain threats, but are completely ineffective in preventing application-layer attacks, which make up as much as 70 percent of the attacks against corporate networks. Sidewinder's network gateway security approach uses application proxies, which deliver superior security with deep content inspection at high speeds. By tightly defining the only allowed client-server interactions with Internet-facing services, the proxy model of network gateway security stops zero-day attacks and the most serious threats that exist.

In addition to application-layer technology and TrustedSource reputation-based security, Sidewinder's network gateway security model boasts superior performance, because this model causes unwanted traffic to be dropped at the gateway. And its Unified Threat Management model consolidates multiple security functions in a single, unified appliance, making security complete with a full battery of anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, anti-phishing, signature-based IDS/IPS, VPN services and URL filtering.

For more information on Secure Computing's Network gateway security solutions, please visit our
Network gateway pages.