Zone Labs ships security-policy management tool

Although Zone Labs has shipped a personal firewall for the desktop for about two years, it has not been until this week that the company made available a security-policy management console for administrators to remotely install and configure the firewall.

Called Zone Labs Integrity, the policy-management console lets administrators push out agent software, which includes the Zone Labs personal firewall, to up to 2,000 desktops. The ZoneAlarm Pro firewall/VPN can block inbound or outbound connections, and can filter content, such as e-mail attachments, as well.

The Integrity management package comes with the Windows 2000-based Integrity Server software, which costs $15,000, to centrally manage desktops by enforcing application controls and gathering usage and log activity. The Integrity Agent software, available for Windows 9x, 2000, ME, NT and XP, costs $80 per workstation.

Security policy can be decided on an individual or group basis, said Fred Felman, Zone Labs vice president of marketing. In addition, Cisco has incorporated what Zone Labs calls its "Cooperative Enforcement" technology into the Cisco VPN 3000 Concentrator Series.

Zone Labs customers can also coordinate security policies with their Radius and NT Domain servers, Felman added. There is not yet support for LDAP Directory, but Zone Labs isn't discounting support for LDAP in the future.

ZoneAlarm firewall/VPNs are used by approximately 1.5 million consumer and business customers, according to Zone Labs. As to why it's taken so much time to develop a security-policy management system for ZoneAlarm Pro, Felman said the challenge was in crafting version control to meet the needs of large companies, which have many versions of applications running.

"We had to give them a way to investigate what applications people are using first, and the agent software can do this for policy life-cycle management," Felman concluded.