IronPort, others shine at Demo ’06

Demo 2006 showcased a wide variety of new offerings designed for consumer and business use, ranging from vertical search engines to identity theft protection – and even a high-tech ice-cream machine.

PHOENIX – Last week’s Demo ’06 conference showcased a wide variety of new offerings designed for consumer and business use, ranging from vertical search engines to identity theft protection – and even a high-tech ice-cream machine.

Roughly 70 companies presented new products at the event, which is owned by Network World.

IronPort announced an appliance designed to keep Web-based threats – including spyware, viruses, keylogging and phishing – from entering an organization. The S-Series appliance, slated to be available this summer, aims to do for Web traffic what IronPort’s existing appliances do for e-mail – catch malware at a company’s gateway.

The appliance includes IronPort’s Web-reputation filters, announced last month, which assess each Web site encountered based on a number of factors to produce a detailed score, says Pat Peterson, CTO of IronPort. These factors include how long the site has been in existence, whether it contains downloadable code, changes in the volume of visitors to the site, and if the URL includes a typo of a popular domain and therefore may be masquerading as it.

The Web-reputation filters can block downloaded content from these sites, based on customer-configured policies.

A number of other companies, including Blue Coat, Finjan, McAfee and SonicWall, have offerings designed to cleanse Web traffic coming into an organization, says Paul Stamp, an analyst at Forrester Research. IronPort may face some challenges competing with these companies, because it is relatively new to the Web security market, he says.

“Using reputation services to augment standard content-filtering adds a nice advantage over what everyone else has, but Web filtering is more about network security than messaging security, so IronPort is often going to be selling to a different customer from their messaging solution,” Stamp says. “Network guys are a lot more bothered about latency and throughput than messaging guys.”

Exact pricing for the S-Series has not been announced, but the company says a midsize enterprise would pay about $25,000.

News at Demo ’06 included:

• LogLogic introduced its LogLogic Compliance Suite, which is designed to give administrators relief from having to scan, dissect and interpret the overwhelming number of log entries created in an organization. With an eye toward compliance, LogLogic collects logs from applications, devices, servers and operating systems, and presents them through a simple Web-based interface, making it easier for administrators to ensure a company’s events and actions comply with regulations and company policies, company officials say. The LogLogic Compliance Suite is priced at about $10,000.
• Avokia demonstrated ApLive, designed to reinforce the availability of enterprise data. ApLive virtualizes the database layer by performing real-time transaction replication and load balancing across databases to lessen the need for scheduled downtime and avoid unplanned downtime, company officials say. ApLive is priced starting at $27,000 per database CPU.
• StrikeForce Technology showed the Demo audience what hackers might see when they install keyloggers on an unsuspecting PC: Credit card information being typed into a Web site and simultaneously being recorded by a keylogger. The company’s WebSecure product is a Web browser plug-in that automatically encrypts keystrokes and routes them directly to a browser, skipping a number of holes that keyloggers take advantage of to intercept personal information. The product is slated for release in the second quarter and will cost $29.95. It will initially work with Internet Explorer, with other browsers to follow.
• Astav showed its NoPhish technology, which protects users from identity theft by letting them enter their passwords into a Web site from their cell phones by making a phone call. Availability and pricing has not been announced.