Raptor captures its largest firewall deal

Raptor Systems Inc. has landed its largest federal deal ever a $1.7 million sale to the Air National Guard to install firewall systems at 96 sites nationwide.

The Guard will use Raptor's Eagle 4.0 firewall to protect the internal networks of all of its flying units. The Guard purchased the firewalls from systems integrator Electronic Systems of Richmond Inc. (ESR) through the General Services Administration's schedule. The firewall purchase was part of a larger turnkey package that included hardware software routers workstations and support services.

Eagle 4.0 operates in both Microsoft Corp. Windows NT and Sun Microsystems Inc. Solaris environments.Erich Baumgartner director of Eastern area sales for Waltham Mass.-based Raptor said the deal is the first to allow users to create virtual private networking (VPN) via "tunnels" - private links between systems allowing users to communicate securely. This feature to be used for secure communications between mobile Guard users and permanent sites restricts specific applications from passing through the tunnel.

For example Telnet sessions can be denied while still allowing critical Simple Network Management Protocol-based network management information to pass through. "It signifies the evolution of the market toward security with virtual private networking " Baumgartner said. "We've architected our products for that marketplace."

The sale also included 1 000 EagleMobile systems desktop or laptop encryption devices that provide a secure tunnel for encrypted information to be transmitted over public networks such as the Internet. These features are particularly helpful to the Guard which deploys personnel with varying information technology skills to all 50 states said Tim McCulloch president of ESR.

"They need to be able to do full-blown remote management from their headquarters " he said. "They have the ability to deploy remote Mobile Eagle firewalls to their officers that are off site."

The VPN tunnel filtering gives the network administrator complete control of the protocols encryption flow direction authentication and addressing of the tunnel. In addition the Eagle firewall features the security operability across the VPN to allow customers to enhance their network environment by mixing and matching secure tunnel endpoints .

Raptor has also integrated CyberPatrol Service into Eagle for blocking internal access to undesirable Uniform Resource Locator addresses.