Check Point Software Technologies, a worldwide leader in securing the Internet, has announced the availability of Check Point R77, the latest release of its award-winning software blade architecture. The Check Point R77 brings together preventative security capabilities, compliance monitoring and real-life performance boosts to existing gateways.
Today's cyber criminals work at a dizzying pace, developing stealthy new attacks and carefully targeting their victims with customised malware. Researchers estimate that an average of 70 000 to 100 000 new malware samples are created and distributed every day. The sheer volume of malware demonstrates the ever-increasing barrage of advanced and previously undiscovered attacks that organisations face. At the same time, the business-critical requirements for network performance continue to grow at an exponential pace. This environment requires a combination of threat prevention capabilities, lightning-fast security infrastructure, and automated regulatory compliance capabilities.
"Our customers need to stay one step ahead of cyber criminals to protect their networks, and R77 provides the best platform and security protections to help them do that. With optimised performance, cloud-based threat emulation and automated compliance monitoring, our software blade architecture is designed from the ground up to be the most comprehensive multi-layered security solution available today," said Doros Hadjizenonos, sales manager at Check Point South Africa.
The product offers more than 50 product enhancements, including a new ThreatCloud Emulation Service, Check Point HyperSpect performance-enhancing technology, Check Point Compliance Software Blade, new Central Device Management, improved user identity awareness with RADIUS and IF-MAP integration, and enhancements to Check Point's GAiA Unified Operating System.
Highlighted features of the new R77 software blade release include:
Check Point ThreatCloud Emulation Service
Check Point's ThreatCloud Emulation Service prevents infections from undiscovered (zero-day) exploits, new variants of malware, and targeted attacks and advanced persistent threats (APTs). Part of Check Point's leading multi-layered Threat Prevention solution, ThreatCloud Emulation Service quickly inspects suspicious files, emulates how they run to discover malicious behaviour, and instantly blocks newly identified malware in e-mail attachments, file downloads and direct Web content. Attack information is then shared to Check Point's collaborative network and cloud-driven knowledge base, ThreatCloud, for automatic protection.
First announced in February 2013, Check Point ThreatCloud Emulation is now offered as a new cloud service, which is based on a global, organisation-wide monthly quota of scanned files. This monthly quota is across all of the security gateways on an organisation's network and is an elastic deployment, allowing for an increase in quota based on usage and growth. ThreatCloud Emulation is also available through the Private Cloud Emulation Appliance.
Check Point HyperSpect
The R77 is the first release to include Check Point HyperSpect, an intelligent, adaptive content inspection engine that maximises hardware utilisation through a wide spectrum of optimisations and accelerations, including hyper threading technologies. Through HyperSpect, organisations will experience significantly higher performance, including up to 50% real-world performance boost on all high-end platforms.
With the simple software upgrade to R77, organisations can safely consolidate security by utilising Check Point's multi-layered software blade protections on the same platform while experiencing sustained performance. HyperSpect increases compute power and optimises inspection tailored to the most popular Internet traffic, such as media streaming and Internet communication, which consume the greatest amount of Internet bandwidth.
Check Point Compliance Software Blade
Check Point's Compliance Software Blade will be generally available through the R77 release. Introduced in March 2013, the Compliance Software Blade is the first next-generation-firewall-integrated and fully automated compliance monitoring solution that leverages an extensive knowledge of regulatory requirements and more than 300 security best practices. The Check Point Compliance Software Blade reduces the complexity of external compliance requirements and internal security mandates by providing instant notification of policy changes, by continuously assessing security posture across all Check Point Software Blades, and by offering actionable recommendations to improve compliance and security.
"The ability of the blade to solve our compliance concerns with regard to audits or security assessments is a huge benefit to our organisation," said William Dippel, manager, Networking, Data Security and Communications at Desert Research Institute. "Not only are we now more compliant with regulations, the blade has made us more secure by directing us to areas of concern for which we were not even aware of beforehand."
Other featured product enhancements
New and integrated Central Device Management: Organisations can efficiently manage and maintain multiple security gateways utilising the new Central Device Management feature. New provisioning capabilities in the SmartDashboard management console help to eliminate configuration errors in complex environments and reduce the operational cost of managing and maintaining security environments. These capabilities do not require an additional licence for implementation.
Check Point GAiA: Enhancements to the Check Point GAiA Unified Secure Operating System brings faster upgrade and updates with decreased downtime by 90% as well as improved user experience on GAiA WebUI for security administrators.
Identity awareness integration: Updates include improved user identity accuracy in non-windows environments by acquiring user identity from RADIUS and IF-MAP integration.
Improved licensing user experience: The R77 makes licensing transparent with automatic licence retrieval and data synchronisation between Check Point's UserCenter and the security management console.
Pricing and availability
The R77 release is a free upgrade for existing customers.
The ThreatCloud Emulation Service is based on a global organisational quota, which begins at a monthly list price of $500 (R5 155) for up to 10 000 files inspected per month.
The R77 and ThreatCloud Emulation Service is available as of 2 September 2013 from Check Point's worldwide partners: http://partners.us.checkpoint.com/partnerlocator/.
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Check Point Software Technologies
Check Point Software Technologies (www.checkpoint.com), the worldwide leader in securing the Internet, provides customers with uncompromised protection against all types of threats, reduces security complexity and lowers total cost of ownership. Check Point first pioneered the industry with FireWall-1 and its patented stateful inspection technology.
Today, Check Point continues to develop new innovations based on the software blade architecture, providing customers with flexible and simple solutions that can be fully customised to meet the exact security needs of any organisation. Check Point is the only vendor to go beyond technology and define security as a business process. Check Point 3D Security uniquely combines policy, people and enforcement for greater protection of information assets, and helps organisations implement a blueprint for security that aligns with business needs. Customers include tens of thousands of organisations of all sizes, including all Fortune and Global 100 companies. Check Point's award-winning ZoneAlarm solutions protect millions of consumers from hackers, spyware and identity theft.
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