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WatchGuard XTM 8 Series Awarded "Unified Threat Management Solution of the Year;" WatchGuard SSL 560 Gets 5-Star Review and Coveted "Recommended" Designation from SC Magazine

SEATTLE – December 2, 2010. WatchGuard® Technologies, a global leader of business security solutions, today announced that the company has received two prestigious awards for its Unified Threat Management (UTM) security appliance and for its high performance SSL VPN offering.

Presented by Network Computing and Computing Security magazines, the WatchGuard XTM 8 Series, a high-performance multifunction firewall appliance, received the top award of "Unified Threat Management Solution of the Year."

Adding to this cadence of industry accolades, SC Magazine, the leading authority on IT security, gave the WatchGuard SSL 560 a five-star review as well as their coveted "recommended" designation in a group test of SSL VPN appliances. The WatchGuard SSL 560 received 5-stars in all the review categories: Features, Ease of use, Performance, Documentation, Support, Value for Money, and Overall Rating.

"As a leader of UTM and VPN solutions, WatchGuard is pleased to receive these two awards," said Eric Aarrestad, Vice President of Marketing at WatchGuard Technologies. "These awards reiterate what so many of our customers and channel partners say – WatchGuard solutions provide unparalleled protection and functionality that simply cannot be beat in terms of performance, capability and total cost of ownership."

WatchGuard XTM 8 Series – UTM Solution of the Year

Built for speed, the WatchGuard XTM 8 Series delivers 5Gbps firewall throughput, making it ideal for demanding networks of 1,000 to 5,000 users. With full security features activated, the XTM 8 Series achieves a faster-than-line-speed 1.2Gbps throughput, which represents a major leap forward for unified threat management appliances in delivering high security without compromising network performance.

Leveraging WatchGuard's "defense-in-depth" firewall technology, which includes stateful packet inspection, deep packet inspection and WatchGuard's proprietary proxy technology, the XTM 8 Series embodies the latest security technologies to protect business networks. With its built in application proxies, the WatchGuard XTM 8 Series natively stops a myriad of blended threats, fragmented and malformed packet attacks, spyware, malware, denial of service and many other types of threats and attacks.

The WatchGuard XTM 8 Series takes full advantage of the highly sophisticated WatchGuard operating system, Fireware XTM, which defends networks by utilizing innovative security features, including WatchGuard's cloud-based Reputation Enabled Defense security service, Application Control, full HTTPS inspection, VoIP security, and IM and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) application blocking. With Fireware XTM, the WatchGuard XTM 8 Series integrates advanced networking capabilities, including clustering, load-balancing and other enterprise-class networking features. Additionally, the XTM 8 Series extends management capabilities by providing role-based access control (RBAC), centralized multi-box management and enhanced reporting functions.

WatchGuard SSL VPN Solutions – Making Remote Access Easy

Nimble by design, the WatchGuard SSL 560 comes ready to go out of the box as an easy to install appliance that almost anyone can set up and run. With its installation wizards, the "time to value" of the WatchGuard SSL 560 is measured in minutes.

Because of its comprehensive authentication technology, the WatchGuard SSL 560 allows businesses the flexibility of defining user databases on-board the appliance, or integrating with other third-party authentication systems, such as LDAP, Active Directory, or RADIUS.

With robust logging and reporting capabilities, the WatchGuard SSL 560 provides a rich history of remote user information that gives businesses insight to better manage and adjust remote resources, applications and infrastructure needs.

For organizations that want to deliver applications or tools to remote users, the WatchGuard SSL 560 offers delivery of non-native desktop and server applications such as SSH (Secure Shell) and RDP (Remote Desktop). This product also adds support for in-demand applications such as Citrix XenApp and Outlook Web Access 2010 and ActiveSync from Microsoft. This support allows remote workers to securely access and work with applications as if they were in the office from any location worldwide.

To help road warriors, WatchGuard provides Desktop Sharing and Remote Assist. This feature allows administrators or business channel partners to initiate connections to remote devices, such as laptops, from their helpdesk. They can then take control of and diagnose remote user issues quickly and easily, thus saving time and helping to keep road warriors productive in the field.

Leveraging WatchGuard's security heritage and technology portfolio, the WatchGuard SSL 560 provides unmatched security features for remote workers. With its deep device examination, end-point integrity checking functionality, businesses can easily create and enforce security policies to ensure connecting devices have firewall protection and up to date anti-virus definitions so that only healthy and policy compliant devices are on the network.

Furthermore, the WatchGuard SSL 560 provides an auto-loading access client, which is a web-based access client that automatically loads after successful authentication. This eliminates the need to pre-install a client application on remote users' systems, while simplifying secure access to network resources.

Additional security can be utilized with onboard two-factor authentication. The WatchGuard SSL 560 can generate SMS-based tokens and one-time password (OTP) to a user's mobile device, such as a corporate cell phone, smart phone or wireless PDA. This provides fast and secure two-factor authentication without having to use other third-party authentication solutions. However, for businesses that currently use external authentication methods, the WatchGuard SSL 560 supports over a dozen different authentication types right out of the box.