Firewall Gets Faster, Less Complex

BorderWare Technologies' Firewall helps provide security-policy enforcement and content control while it boosts performance

Martin Garvey, Contributor

May 6, 2005

2 Min Read
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Firewalls can do a good job of preventing intrusions and helping to track down malicious threats that have gained entrance to a network. But if the process takes too long, network performance can be slowed.

BorderWare Technologies Inc. last week introduced a firewall that's designed to improve network performance while also providing security-policy enforcement and management, content control, and easy deployment. The MXtreme Mail Firewall version 5.0 will boost throughput by 30% compared with its predecessor, letting customers handle increasing E-mail volumes without investing in more bandwidth and infrastructure, according to BorderWare.

A new user interface comes with simplified navigation, real-time help, and less-complex configuration. Policy management now includes content filtering. And content management includes objectionable-content filtering, which can be set up to apply rules to incoming and outgoing messages to keep unwanted content from entering the network.

MXtreme pricing starts at $7,995 for the MX-200 and goes to $65,000 for the high-end MX-1000.

"Near term, this firewall should be able to address processing bottlenecks from virus, spam, and Trojan horse searches," says Michael Osterman, an industry analyst and founder of Osterman Research. "Without the performance boost, searching creates problems for backing up messages."

A current BorderWare firewall customer is just waiting for a maintenance window to upgrade. Arne Halvorsen, an IT consultant at Computer Sciences Corp. who serves as a collaborative lead at Saint Vincent Catholic Medical Centers of New York, says performance is so good with the current system that any performance boost will be "whip cream and a cherry on top."

Halvorsen oversees 5,000 user E-mail boxes and has no complaints about any performance degradation, but he looks forward to the upcoming MXtreme 500's ability to process 30% more E-mail without taking any additional time. Halvorsen says that will be of great help to companies with 50,000 to 100,000 E-mail in-boxes.

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