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WatchGuard Boosts Firewall Capabilities
April 2011 by Marc Jacob
WatchGuard® Technologies has today released new enhancements to its extensible threat management (XTM) family of multifunction firewalls. In this latest release of the XTM operating system, administrators gain the ability to manage search capabilities, as well as additional Application Control features to manage the explosive-growth landscape of web applications.
With the new WatchGuard Safe Search feature, administrators are able to manage and enforce search engine filtering settings to ensure users, and in particular children, do not see adult content in search results. By setting this option at the XTM firewall gateway, administrators override whatever preference users set in their web browser. WatchGuard Safe Search works with leading search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com. Additionally, the safe search feature enforces “safety mode” on YouTube to filter out and remove objectionable content or comments. This is especially useful for schools and libraries.
With this new XTM release, WatchGuard further enhances its Application Control functionality. Now, administrators can manage more than 1,800 applications, which squarely positions WatchGuard Application Control above any competitive UTM or Next Generation Firewall. Notable additions include identification of Android and iPhone mobile phone browsers, and popular social networking and web 2.0 applications from around the world, such as Viadeo (France), Tuenti (Spain), Hyves (Netherlands) and Mixi.jp (Japan).
Additionally, administrators will appreciate new user interface controls that simplify common tasks, including applying application actions to multiple policies and setting policy by application category. Rules by category are automatically updated to include any new applications that are added to a category as part of regular signature updates.
Finally, policy, VPN and SNMP enhancements further round-out this latest software release, making WatchGuard firewalls even easier to use and yet, more capable of protecting networks, applications and data than ever before.
