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Independent Tests Validate WatchGuard's Ability to Protect Mid-Sized Enterprises Nearly 3.5 Times Faster than Competing Solutions.

WatchGuard UTM Solutions 'Architected for Speed'.

SEATTLE -- July 10, 2013 -- WatchGuard® Technologies, a global leader in manageable business security solutions, has been awarded a "Performance Verified Certification" by independent test lab, Miercom, for performing nearly 3.5 times faster than competing unified threat management (UTM) solutions with standard UTM features enabled. The award gives both small and mid-sized enterprises assurance that WatchGuard UTM solutions can deliver the security and performance they need, while allowing them to benefit from the cost savings of UTM compared to stand alone solutions. According to Gartner, "savings of half of the total cost for network security can be achieved for small or midsize businesses (SMBs) using UTM."

Miercom conducted throughput tests on WatchGuard's XTM 850 solution against similarly priced competing appliances from Fortinet, SonicWALL and Sophos. The test explored the impact on throughput speed with standard UTM features switched on, including not only basic firewall packet filtering, but also deep packet inspection and/or proxies, intrusion prevention and anti-virus, which is critical in catching modern malware's multi-vectored threats.

"Our hands-on testing proved the WatchGuard XTM 850 provides the best overall performance compared to competitive products when UTM features are applied," said Rob Smithers, CEO of Miercom. "Today's businesses need more than a firewall. They also need to employ anti-virus and intrusion prevention to have the best chance at catching today's advanced threats – and they need a way to do this without slowing network speeds, or increasing their budgets."

"These tests validate the reason why customers from both small and mid-sized enterprise customers around the world are choosing WatchGuard's UTM solution," said Roger Klorese, director of product management at WatchGuard. "UTM, once viewed to be a SMB solution, has moved from the trough of disillusionment in August 2011 to the slope of enlightenment in July 2012 within the Gartner Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection as mid-sized customers gain confidence that they can benefit from the security cost savings of UTM, and know that the performance they need is there to support their performance service level agreements."

"We're architected for speed," added Sin-Yaw Wang, WatchGuard vice president of engineering. "Our UTM solutions stand on the shoulders of the world's fastest processors from Intel and Freescale. Their modern, multi-core processors give our UTM solutions the power they need to run all of their engines in parallel without causing a bottleneck in performance. Plus, it gives us 'head room' to add future UTM engines as security trends demand."