Cyber Warfare Comes to Main Street: WatchGuard Introduces New Firewalls to Arm Small Businesses with Industry’s Most Powerful Protection

Small companies are the new big target: SMBs represent the majority of businesses and nearly 44 percent have already been attacked¹

Encrypted traffic explodes post Snowden: New WatchGuard Firebox M200 and M300 firewalls chew through encrypted streams 385 percent faster than competitors and 218 percent faster overall with all security engines turned on

INFOSECURITY EUROPE, LONDON, U.K. – June 3, 2015 — WatchGuard® Technologies, a leading global provider of multi-function security appliances, today announced a new series of powerful, enterprise-strength firewalls engineered specifically to protect small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) everywhere. SMBs are increasingly the focus of cyber attacks that are no less sophisticated than those targeting large enterprises. WatchGuard’s new Firebox® M200 and M300 Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFW) and Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliances are up to 218 percent faster than competitors with all the layers of the company’s award-winning defense-in-depth solutions turned on. Plus, the new firewalls are up to 385 percent faster performing HTTPS inspection, which is increasingly critical given encrypted traffic is expected to make up 75 percent of the total Internet traffic by 2016.

“While Sony and Target breaches have dominated the headlines, in reality small businesses like Dot’s Hamburgers, Smythe and Son’s Manufacturing, and Four Cities Regional Pharmacy are equally under attack,” said Corey Nachreiner, chief technology officer at WatchGuard. “In fact, smaller companies are generally less protected and easier to breach, with nearly 44 percent already affected by cyber attacks. Statistically, many of them won’t survive the attack beyond six months. The Firebox M200 and M300 are 100 percent focused on making it easy for SMBs to protect themselves as well as large enterprises.”

“As a fast growing SMB, our customers, employees and growth are everything to us. A major breach or PCI compliance issue could shut us down,” said Jamie Stables, support analyst at Brompton Bikes, a UK-based manufacturer and global retailer of folding bikes. “With WatchGuard’s new firewalls, we have the horsepower to watch both HTTP and HTTPS streams, and ensure we’re protecting our assets. More so, Dimension allows us to easily see the key threats impacting our business, and we still have the performance we need to keep our employees happy and productive.”

The new Firebox M200 and M300 run WatchGuard’s powerful Fireware® operating system and include the latest generation of Freescale multi-core processors, ensuring the appliances have the power to run all of the UTM and NGFW engines in parallel without causing a bottleneck in performance at any price point. Both appliances also offer RapidDeploy support that simplifies deployment for SMBs, which usually have smaller, less technical staff. For complete product information, please click here.

Download “The Cyber Crime Guide for Small and Midsize Businesses” eBook to learn more about how cyber crime is affecting your business and what to do about it.