NC-1000 gateway now has network firewalls

NetContinuum officials today released a new version of its security gateway, offering network and application firewall protection in a single, integrated appliance.

By providing both types of protection in a single box, information technology managers can reduce the number of devices they need to deploy to secure applications, according to Wes Wasson, vice president of marketing and chief strategy officer at NetContinuum.

With the NC-1000 Web Security Gateway version 4.0, IT managers can set separate network firewall policies for each unique application residing on servers in a secure area, known as the demilitarized zone, of the corporate network, he said.

Corporations will still need to place traditional, general purpose firewalls in front of corporate local area networks, but will not have to use two firewalls to protect Web applications, industry experts said.

NetContinuum is placed "in front of servers to protect data on servers" from attack, said Pete Lindstrom, director of research at Spire Security LLC.

The NC-1000 is an emerging class of security appliances that can inspect and block Web traffic that can flow through a corporate firewall undetected. The appliance can be deployed behind the firewall to inspect Web traffic coming through internet server port 80 -- the port that experiences the majority of cyberattacks.

The NC-1000 also offloads compute-intensive processes from back-end servers such as TCP and Secure Socket Layer encryption processing.

In addition to allowing IT administrators to set application-layer policies in the same way network firewall rules are set and managed, NC-1000 4.0 offers Web Address Translation, which lets managers secure and manage Web addresses. Company officials have submitted WAT for consideration as an industry standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force.

The product is available as a free software upgrade to existing customers. New users can purchase the appliance for $28,000.