MCI strengthens security services

Fresh out of bankruptcy, MCI last week introduced a slew of services that the carrier says show it is getting increasingly serious about security.

The offerings, which range from intrusion protection to e-mail filtering, add to new Secure Sockets Layer VPN and denial-of-service (DoS) protection services aired by MCI over the past two months.

"I'm impressed with the road map they have provided in terms of breadth of the offerings," says Michael Suby, an analyst at Stratecast Partners. "MCI has a lot of work ahead of it post-bankruptcy, but putting its effort toward managed security services is a smart move."

To continue reading, register here and become an Insider. You'll get free access to premium content from CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World. See more Insider content or sign in.

Fresh out of bankruptcy, MCI last week introduced a slew of services that the carrier says show it is getting increasingly serious about security.

The offerings, which range from intrusion protection to e-mail filtering, add to new Secure Sockets Layer VPN and denial-of-service (DoS) protection services aired by MCI over the past two months.

"I'm impressed with the road map they have provided in terms of breadth of the offerings," says Michael Suby, an analyst at Stratecast Partners. "MCI has a lot of work ahead of it post-bankruptcy, but putting its effort toward managed security services is a smart move."

New offerings include the Managed Intrusion Prevention service, which lets customers deploy an Internet Security Systems (ISS) RealSecure or NetScreen Technologies Intrusion Detection and Prevention device. The devices can be used to warn about attacks or to mitigate them, such as by making a change to a firewall to block traffic from a specific port.

MCI also now offers network vulnerability scanning through ISS. Previously the carrier only bundled this service with its Managed Firewall offering.

On the e-mail security front, MCI is teaming with MessageLabs to offer the Managed E-mail Content Service. Users can redirect their e-mail servers to MessageLab's data centers, where messages are scanned for viruses or spam before they hit a customer's network. MessageLabs runs anti-virus engines from CyberSoft, F-Secure, MessageLabs and Network Associates. All infected e-mail is quarantined with notices sent out to recipient, sender and network administrator.

Sprint has offered a similar service with FrontBridge for the past 18 months. Last week they forged a broader marketing deal.

MCI also offers a Managed PKI service that's primarily supported by VeriSign, which supplies digital certificates to users and then authenticates them before allowing access to a corporate network.

MCI is expanding its managed firewall services next month by adding support for Cisco PIX and NetScreen firewalls. MCI has offered only Check Point firewall support up until now. MCI also has developed the Managed Firewall Office service for small and midsize businesses and Managed Firewall Solo for individual business users.

Separately, MCI is testing tools that will automatically take action when a DoS attack targets a customer's network, but declined to say when such technology would become available.

AT&T last month announced such an offering in its Internet Protect service, which provides proactive protection for users when under a DoS attack.

Read more about security in Network World's Security section.