The Latest WatchGuard News
Product and Solution Information, Press Releases, Announcements

"WatchGuard continues to innovate and improve on its industry leading security appliances that protect business networks, applications and data," said Tim Helming, Director of Product Management, WatchGuard Technologies. "With this latest version of Fireware XTM, businesses gain greater control over unauthorized IM applications and superior logging and reporting for today's stringent audit and compliance requirements."

Addressing security and productivity holes associated with unauthorized instant messaging and file-sharing use, the new WatchGuard Fireware XTM release allows administrators to block Skype connections to and from protected hosts. This new feature adds to the current ability to block pernicious IM and file-sharing applications, such as: AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Microsoft Messenger, BitTorrent, Kazaa and others.

For managed security service providers (MSSPs) and remote administrators, the new Fireware XTM now offers a customizable, browser-based interface for reporting. This streamlines the ability to generate a variety of historic or on-demand reports without having to install any special reporting software.

Additionally, MSSPs and enterprise customers often require scalability and high availability of log and reports databases. With the new WatchGuard System Manager (WSM) that comes with Fireware XTM, the PostGRE databases for logging and reporting can be hosted on a separate PC from the log and report servers, which provides higher performance on the log/report servers as well as the database server. Furthermore, this allows for easier backup or even clustering of the server host.

Lastly, the new management features in Fireware XTM allow for health monitoring of the WatchGuard System Manager Log, Report, and Management servers. This provides notification to MSSPs and administrators who need to ensure highly aggressive service levels.