IS launches new outsourced Firewall solution

IS (The Internet Solution) has announced a new building block in its solution suite designed to provide the foundations for the online business and electronic commerce environment. This affordable outsourced firewall solution ensures that organisations can conduct business over the Internet in a completely secure manner. High availability and resilience to failure has been built into this new security solution, so customers are assured of the continuity and uptime of their online business.

Says Clinton O` Leary (IS Security Product Specialist), "The increasing demand in connectivity to the Internet has bought about many exciting changes to the way people and businesses communicate and exchange private information. The unfortunate reality is that increased connectivity brings about increased Network Security threats and vulnerabilities. To protect our customers, IS has designed one of the most reliable, redundant and securely hosted Firewall services. This new service replaces and extends IS` well established outsourced firewall solution first brought to market in 1996. It makes use of the latest technology to ensure maximum, security, performance, and availability."

O` Leary adds that when evaluating an infrastructure on which to install and maintain a company`s offsite firewall, some of the key considerations are:

• Full protection for network resources and machines connected to the network against security threats that are posed when connecting the network to the Internet,
• a mechanism to monitor and report on internal employees` activities on the Internet,
• a fully managed solution that does not require the client to carry for full time resources,
• built-in redundancy and hardware backup to ensure business continuity,
• solution deployment that does not require any re-configuration on the client network,
• and a solution that can be moved to the customer premises seamlessly.

IS has taken these requirements into account and incorporated all of them into the new solution. The outsourced firewall service is aimed at small to medium-sized businesses, and enterprise branch offices. These customers can now benefit from IS` extensive knowledge and experience in Internet security.

Says O`Leary, "The IS Outsourced Firewall solution is based on the Cisco Secure PIX firewall, which is ranked as one of the most secure firewalls in the world today. The Cisco Secure PIX Firewall is a dedicated hardware based, stateful packet filtering firewall, which essentially eliminates the risks, associated with security breaches within general-purpose operating systems. The PIX Solution offers the highest performance and is more scalable than application-level firewalls while remaining the least complex."

IS has developed an extremely scalable, high availability environment with built-in redundancy on each component forming part of the solution, from physical devices on the network, to each server. Furthermore, summarized management reporting tools will be provided for each client on the IS Customer Zone, thus alleviating costs and engineering skills usually needed to manage and monitor network security.