Solutions
Spam Blocking
Spam may be cheap for the people who send it, but it can be a serious expense for your business. According to a study conducted earlier this year by Nucleus Research Inc., spam management costs U.S. businesses more than $71 billion annually in lost productivity — $712 per employee. In 2007 it was estimated that 70 percent of all email was spam.
Lost Productivity: Spam wastes employees' time. The average employee spends 16 seconds reviewing and deleting each spam message, according to Nucleus Research. The company estimates that at businesses that quarantine spam (where junk messages are placed in a directory for review and confirmation by recipients), each user spends an average of 4.5 minutes per week reviewing messages. Deleting messages, however, turns out to be the most expensive spam strategy. The average employee at companies that delete spam messages loses an average of 7.3 minutes per week looking for lost legitimate messages.
Wasted Storage: Companies that quarantine spam must add extra storage capacity to accommodate suspicious mail so that users can review it at their leisure. But many users never bother to review their quarantined messages, so the email just sits there, consuming storage space and money.
Data Protection / Archiving
IRONWALL solutions knows your data is important to you and your customers. Data protection can mean anything from the recovery of a file deleted a few hours ago, to a full data restore in the event of a disaster. Gone are the days when you could drop a cartridge into your tape backup unit and hope that it is readable when you need it three months later. How and what data needs to be protected is far more complex than the days when backup and archiving were essentially the same.
Most companies find they need to have one technology designed for the fast recovery and high availability requirements of systems disaster recovery, and another designed specifically for archiving data, with indexing, automated data policy management, and de-duplication features. We strive to provide best-in-class data protection and archiving products to meet your business objectives for disaster recovery, business continuity, and legal protection purposes.
IRONWALL brings together a variety of proprietary and best-in-class hardware, software, and service solutions to ensure that your data is available to you. That could mean software such as Acronis, for bare metal restores of your mission critical servers, or Double-Take, for replicating your most highly sensitive and volatile data. Sometimes the most appropriate application is a hardware solution, such as the Barracuda email-archiving appliance, for ensuring that you meet critical regulatory requirements, or a Sepaton VTL (Virtual Tape Library) solution, to replace your aging tape backup system.
Web Filtering
The role of the Web Filtering has really grown over the past few years. Originally, URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) were simple tools to help point your Web browser at the Web page of your choice. Today, they are a highly extensible 'meta language' allowing remote computers to exchange executable content and commands as well as a conduit for client/server data. Therefore, controlling the URLs that enter and leave your network is an important way to reduce risks posed by "Hackers", "Worms", and "Spyware".
Here are three ways filtering URLs on their way out of your network can make you safer:
1. Require users to access the Internet via a proxy server. A Web proxy gives you a single point for monitoring and controlling your outbound traffic. If you configure the proxy to cache frequently used pages and graphics, it can also help make the most of your bandwidth. Proxy servers are available from a variety of commercial vendors.
2. Consider filtering outbound URLs to enforce compliance with corporate Internet acceptable usage policies. By checking URLs against lists of known "inappropriate" sites, you reduce the risk of HR problems due to non-work-related Web content.
3. URL filters can also be valuable tools in the fight against spyware, worms and Trojan software. In addition to allowing you to block access to sites harboring harmful code, they can help you eliminate the use of Web-based e-mail services, file sharing sites and other Web resources that allow files into your network without the proper Virus scanning. Filtering inbound URLs can really ruin a hacker's day -- and we security professionals just love to ruin hackers' days.
Here are two ways to control the URLs entering your network:
1. Many attacks on Web-based applications rely on the attacker's ability to feed programs unexpected input from parameters passed in URLs. The first line of defense is having well-written Web applications that validate inputs and protect themselves against attack.
2. Add an application level firewall to create defense in-depth. When packets try to enter your network, subject them to rules that insure they should be admitted. Attackers have moved up the stack, targeting applications, and so should you.
Whether you filter inbound URLs, outbound URLs or both, there will be times when the filter blocks legitimate traffic and your users are going to get upset. Make sure you have a plan for the exceptions. You should also have a process that allows users to report filtering problems, and resolve them quickly and consistently, so the business manager will not see security as a business obstacle. While URL filtering is not a complete solution to the problems posed by Malware and inappropriate content, when properly used, it is a key component of a "Defense in Depth" strategy for corporate networks.
Load Balancing
Load balancing is a technique to spread work between two or more computers, network links, CPUs, hard drives, or other resources, in order to get optimal resource utilization, throughput, or response time. Using multiple components with load balancing, instead of a single component, may increase reliability through redundancy. The balancing service is usually provided by a dedicated program or hardware device (such as a Multilayer Switch). It is commonly used to mediate internal communications in computer clusters, especially High-Availability clusters.
Website Security
A Website Firewall protects Web applications and Web services from malicious attacks, and can also increase the performance and scalability of these applications. IRONWALL’s solutions are capable of delivering, securing and managing enterprise Web applications from a single appliance through intuitive, real-time user interfaces.
- Single point of protection for inbound and outbound traffic for all Web applications
- Protects Web sites and Web applications against application layer attacks
- Delivers best practices security right out of the box
- Monitors traffic and provides reports about attackers and attack attempts
IRONWALL’s provides award-winning solutions from all common attacks on Web applications, including SQL injections, cross-site scripting attacks, session tampering and buffer overflows.
Many applications are vulnerable to such attacks because application developers do not consistently employ secure coding practices. Our Solutions are designed to combat all attack types that have been categorized as significant threats, including:
- Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
- SQL injection flaws
- OS command injections
- Site reconnaissance
- Session hijacking
- Application denial of service
- Malicious probes/crawlers
- Cookie/session tampering
- Path traversal
- Information leakage
Instant Messaging Security
Our trusted solutions provide everything an organization needs to control and manage internal and external instant messaging (IM) traffic. They combine an integrated IM server and gateway solution that is powerful, easy to use and affordable for businesses of all sizes. Installing in minutes, they can easily and completely identify and manage both internal and public IM traffic within your organization. By implementing these solutions, your organization can eliminate the security, virus, or compliance risks of instant messaging while harnessing the communications and productivity benefits for which IM has become an indispensable asset.
Network Monitoring
Network monitoring is spying for a good cause. Actually, network monitoring is something you want at least one of your systems to be doing. While your other systems are performing their vital functions, you need to set aside at least one computer or set of computers to monitor network activity. Think of network monitoring as policing your network traffic.
Balancing Multiple Internet Lines
Link Balancing is an affordable and powerful solution for routing and managing traffic across multiple Internet connections. Designed to scale for high bandwidth requirements and provide business continuity for an organization of any size, Our Link Balancer optimizes the use of multiple Internet links, such as T1s, T3s, DSL and cable connections from one or multiple Internet service providers. Capable of automatic failover in the event of link failure, the Barracuda Link Balancer helps assure that your network is always connected to the Internet.
