WatchGuard announces launch of virtual appliances

WatchGuard is to go into the virtual firewall market this month with four appliances.

The company is launching virtual versions of its XTM and XCS solutions this month which could run on a single vSphere hypervisor, with products available for small, mid-sized and huge environments.

XTMv and XCSv can even offer application control, reputation-enabled defence, intrusion prevention, gateway anti-virus, web-blocker and spam-blocker features.

Eric Aarrestad, vice-president of selling at WatchGuard, told SC Magazine said that the corporate was aware of demand for a move to virtualisation and it already had 400 beta customers.

He said: “The product is equal to the applying but we're offering four versions of every for the small office to the information centre; it's controlled by a licence for the collection of users and throughput.

“We see three scenarios: multi-tenancy with the managed security organisation (MSSP) being asked by IT for something that's partitional for the shopper; for users who're experiencing growth within the mid-market who need app control; and for those trying to virtualise specific areas but are unsure about how you can determine the fringe.

“We also anticipate large adoption with branch consolidation as, in place of have five appliances, they are going to have a virtual appliance. It is a top-down strategy as software virtual options are growing and we wish to provide this to customers.”

WatchGuard said the XCSv series can manage traffic passing in the virtual infrastructure and be deployed alongside messaging and web servers and across internal networks between virtual machines inside the same cluster or at the same server.

WatchGuard has also announced that Dundee City Council has installed its next-generation firewalls and content protection appliances as portion of its investment in enhanced security, better performance and larger defence extensive for its IT systems. It has selected the XTM 810 and XCS 770R solutions to secure greater than 100 council sites and six,000 users across offices, depots, schools and libraries.

Don Higson, IT projects officer at Dundee City Council, said: “We currently receive around four million emails each month, of which generally 20 per cent is clean. That's loads of spam and potential malicious threats, however the fast throughput and accuracy of the WatchGuard XCS appliances mean that the majority of those emails are blocked before they get to our users â€" that mitigates the hazards and decreases wasted time checking through unwanted messages.

“By combining powerful anti-spam and anti-virus together with our planned introduction of robust data leakage prevention capabilities, the WatchGuard XCS will protect sensitive data behind the firewall.”