eWeek magazine says the WatchGuard Firebox M500 “offers a solution to one of the most critical pain points faced by network administrators today – keeping systems secure, even when dealing with encrypted traffic.”

WatchGuard aims to alleviate the performance and security issues presented by the broad adoption of HTTPS with the M500 Unified Threat Management Appliance.

HTTPS has become the standard bearer for Web traffic, thanks to privacy concerns, highly publicised network breaches and increased public demand for heightened Web security.
While HTTPS does a great job of encrypting what used to be open Web traffic, the technology does have some significant implications for those looking to keep networks secure and protected from threats.

For example, many enterprises are leveraging unified threat management (UTM) appliances to prevent advanced persistent threats (APTs), viruses, data leakage and numerous other threats from compromising network security. However, HTTPS has the ability to hide traffic via encryption from those UTMs and, in turn, nullifies many of the security features of those devices.

That situation has forced appliance vendors to incorporate a mechanism that decrypts HTTPS traffic and examine the data payloads for problems. On the surface, that may sound like a solution to what should never have been a problem to begin with but, in fact, has created additional pain points for network managers.

Those pain points come in the form of throughput and latency, where a UTM now has to deal with encrypted traffic from hundreds or even thousands of users, straining application-specific ICs (ASICs) to the breaking point and severely degrading the performance of network connections. What’s more, the situation is only bound to get worse as more and more Websites adopt HTTPS and rely on the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to keep data encrypted and secure from unauthorised decryption.

Simply put, encryption hampers a UTM’s ability to scan for viruses, spear-phishing attacks, APTs, SQL injection and data leakage, and reduces URL filtering capabilities.

WatchGuard Firebox M500 Tackles the Encryption Conundrum

WatchGuard Technologies, based in Seattle, has been a player in the enterprise security space for some 20 years and has developed numerous security solutions, appliances and devices to combat the ever-growing threats presented by connectivity to the world at large.

The company released the Firebox M500 at the end of November 2014 to address the ever-growing complexity that encryption has brought to enterprise security. While encryption has proven to be very beneficial for enterprise networks trying to protect privacy and prevent eavesdropping, it has also presented a dark side, where malware can be hidden within network traffic and only discovered at the endpoint, often too late.

Read the full article here – http://www.eweek.com/security/watchguard-m500-appliance-alleviates-https-performance-woes.html

The WatchGuard M500 is available now from our online store – http://www.firewalls4now.com.au/watchguard/threat-management/firebox-m-series-15/firebox-m500.html