SecureData, a member of the JSE-listed ERP.com Group and the southern African distributor for Application Security, today announced the latter's latest version of AirDefense Personal.
AirDefense Personal 3.0 provides the industry's most comprehensive real-time threat detection and automated response for mobile workers. With rich functionality and an intuitive user interface, AirDefense Personal 3.0 enables administrators to easily create and automatically enforce wireless policies across the enterprise and it seamlessly integrates with AirDefense http://www.airdefense.net/newsandpress/12_12_05.php to offer the industry's most complete, end-to-end wireless intrusion prevention platform for uninterrupted protection inside and outside of the office.
More than half of all workers within an enterprise will be outfitted with notebook computers within the next three years and almost all of these devices will be wirelessly enabled, according to J Gold Associates.
In practice, within the next two to three years, suggests the Boston area research firm, knowledge workers will be mobile more than 50% of the time, working from diverse locations including the office, home, hotspots and customer sites. While millions of mobile employees are greatly enhancing their productivity by using wireless devices to conduct business in and out of the office, along with the convenience of wireless connectivity comes an increase in security threats, including bridging, probing laptop, ad hoc peer-to-peer network, phishing, evil twin, man-in-the-middle and other attacks.
AirDefense Personal 3.0 eliminates these and other threats by automatically responding to events according to company policies. For example, when a mobile worker returns to the office and connects to the network after working at a wireless hotspot, simultaneous wired and wireless connections form a bridge between the open wireless network and the company's secure wired network, essentially creating an entry point for an attack. AirDefense Personal 3.0 automatically disconnects the wireless connection once a wired connection is established, thereby preventing the bridge. When the mobile worker disconnects from the wired network, the wireless connection is automatically restored, providing uninterrupted mobile worker protection and productivity.
"We feel that AirDefense Personal is one of the most important, unique products in the wireless mobility field available today," commented Edward Stefanescu, Managing Director of Pacific Data. "Many of our customers are seeing this technology as a must have for their mobile workforces and are looking forward to version 3.0's new feature set."
AirDefense Personal's flexible policy engine allows enterprises to centrally create, distribute and enforce policies such as allowing the use of specific VPNs, banning insecure applications on unencrypted networks, banned bandwidth hungry applications such as P2P and Video Streaming, Bluetooth, high-speed data cards (EV-DO, GPRS, EDGE and other 3G technologies) and certain hot spots. With the AirDefense RF Boost feature, administrators can easily create custom policies and alarms to address company-specific needs; and these policies may be defined by groups, such as sales, engineering or finance, and by profiles and actions, such as telecommuters or administrators. AirDefense Personal 3.0 also enables administrators to 'black list' non-sanctioned networks, such as overlapping neighbour networks, as well as to track the location of all enterprise information assets. For example, AirDefense Personal allows administrators to determine in which city a mobile worker is connected, or where he or she was last connected or attacked.
Highly efficient and requiring little memory, AirDefense Personal is designed to work in conjunction with other client utilities, and because the system is centrally managed, administrators can install agents with no end-user involvement to effectively monitor activity and enforce policies throughout the organisation. Further minimising the impact on network administrators, AirDefense Personal provides a user-friendly interface that affords managers 'quick glance' detection of event status and actions from the minimised tool bar.
"While businesses are contentiously adopting new technologies to enhance productivity, managing those technologies has put an ever-increasing burden on enterprise administrators," added Anil Khatod, President and CEO of AirDefense, ranked among Red Herring's Top 100 Private Companies in North America.
"AirDefense Personal 3.0 enables companies to provide their mobile workers with the tools to work securely when and where they are needed, while simplifying and automating the management of those assets from the administrator's desktop. AirDefense is working to help businesses improve productivity, while protecting their existing physical and network security investments and minimising the impact on administrators and resources."
For further information, please contact Bianca Maritz at telephone +27 (011) 257 8600; fax +27 (011) 257 8699; e-mail biancam@securedata.co.za.
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AirDefense is the market leader in anywhere, anytime wireless security and monitoring and is trusted by more Fortune 500 companies, healthcare organisations and high-security government agencies for enterprise wireless protection. It is ranked among Red Herring's Top 100 Private Companies in North American and its products provide the most advanced solutions for rogue wireless detection, policy enforcement and intrusion prevention, both inside and outside an organisation's physical locations and wired networks. Common Criteria-certified, AirDefense enterprise-class products scale to support single offices as well as organisations with hundreds of locations around the globe. Founded in 2001, AirDefense is based in Alpharetta, Georgia, USA, and serves hundreds of government agencies and blue chip corporations.
SecureData
SecureData, an ERP.com company, is Africa's premier IT security solution provider. SecureData's solutions incorporate anti-virus and content security, network security, intrusion prevention software and network asset management. SecureData's comprehensive "Managed Security Services" include design, audit, implementation, vulnerability assessment, outsourcing and hosting. SecureData distributes, sells and supports category leading IT security products to the public, corporate and SME sectors throughout Africa as well as products and services to the SOHO and consumer markets through partnerships with ISPs. As well as being the sole distributor in Sub-Saharan Africa for Trend Micro, SecureData is the African distributor for US-based TippingPoint Technologies and the Southern African distributor for US-based AirDefense, Application Security, eEye, Rocket Software, RSA Security, St Bernard and Websense. For more information, visit SecureData at www.securedata.co.za.
ERP.com
ERP.com is a JSE-listed company focused on the implementation, integration and management of enterprise applications in an e-business environment. For more information, visit ERP.com at www.erpcom.co.za.
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