Secure to unveil NT firewall
The company's upcoming announcement shows it is elevating its strategic focus on Windows NT.
"We recognized that we were late coming into the NT firewall market," said Christine Hughes, Secure's vice president of marketing, noting that the company announced its first native NT firewall in March, upgrading it in July. "We have continued to say that this is an investment year."
"We have tried to stay at the enterprise level in medium to larger corporations where we can leverage Secure's other capabilities, not just technology but professional services," Hughes said in a reference to the company's security consulting arm. But the company still thinks Unix is important and hinted that next year it will merge two separate Unix firewalls into a single offering.
That also positions Secure's NT firewall above the intensely competitive low end, where giants Cisco, Microsoft, and the new Network Associates are expected to play.
The Windows NT segment also is the strength of Raptor Systems, which is being acquired by Axent Technologies in a deal announced Monday. An executive at Network Associates, created in the just-completed merger of McAfee and Network General, said Monday that the company may add Network General technology to McAfee's free WebWall NT firewall and market it more aggressively.
Check Point, the largest firewall vendor, offers both NT and Unix firewalls.
Secure Computing Firewall for NT 3.0 uses a combination of packet filtering and circuit level and application level gateway technologies to keep unauthorized users away from sensitive corporate networks and data.
It also integrates with other security offering from Secure--URL monitoring and filtering from its SmartFilter software and authentication from its SafeWord product.
It also features virtual private networking capabilities supporting Microsoft's Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol, which allows for creating an encrypted tunnel through the Internet between two locations , and for virus protection interoperates with Symantec's Norton AntiVirus for Firewalls. Scanning for hostile Java applets and ActiveX controls is available through interoperability with Content Vectoring Protocol-compliant content filtering tools from third parties.
Secure's new firewall is targeted at larger installations, as reflected in its pricing. A 50-user license is available for $3,000; a 200-user license costs $7,000; and unlimited user licenses are available for $11,000. That is a steep hike from the last version of the same product, which cost $1,500 for 50 users and $2,000 for an unlimited number.