Interop: E-mail security vendors to make splash

A pair of veteran security vendors will use Interop as a stage for announcing new and upgraded products designed to keep corporate messaging systems protected from a variety of threats.

Following its February purchase of MailFrontier, SonicWall on Tuesday plans to announce the first release of MailFrontier’s e-mail security gateway software and appliances under the SonicWall name. SonicWall plans to expand MailFrontier’s target market of midsize companies to include small- and midsize businesses (SMB), says Gleb Budman, SonicWall’s director of product management for e-mail security.

The SonicWall Email Security offerings protect against e-mail threats and include auditing, policy management and regulatory compliance features, Budman says.

Slated for release later this month, the SonicWall SMB Series Email Security appliances will include additional monitoring features and a new audit function that reports to administrators what happens to a message once it is received, Budman says. These appliances are aimed at companies with 50 to 1,000 users and will start at $1,395.

The SonicWall Enterprise Series Email Security appliances, designed for companies with 1,000 to 5,000 users, are set to be released next month, priced starting at $16,000. They will include the same monitoring and auditing upgrades as the SMB version and are based on a more robust hardware platform than their lower-end counterparts.

SonicWall Email Security 4.6 gateway software is available now, priced at $995 for as many as 50 users and $22,995 for 5,000 or more users.

With its MailFrontier acquisition, SonicWall is entering the crowded e-mail security arena where companies are struggling to distinguish themselves. SonicWall hopes a robust feature set and simplified administration will help it stand out, Budman says.

Ease of use is what sold Brian Marko, server operations engineer at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida, to choose MailFrontier’s e-mail security appliance last summer. Marko also tested appliances from Barracuda, IronPort and Symantec. “As far as ease of implementation and use, the other three didn’t seem nearly as easy,” says Marko, who manages about 2,000 in-boxes.

He said he’s concerned when a vendor is acquired but hasn’t noted any changes in support or the quality of updates for the appliance since the SonicWall acquisition.

During the second half of the year, SonicWall plans to integrate its e-mail security products more closely with its other network security offerings, Budman says.

Mirapoint on Monday plans to announce a dedicated reporting appliance designed to give administrators and executives an understanding of their companies’ messaging trends, such as the amount of e-mail received and what percentage of it is spam or infected by a virus.

Called Messaging Reporter, the stand-alone appliance collects information generated by Mirapoint’s RazorGate gateway e-mail security appliance and its Message Server mail server software to create reports that can span up to a 10-year period, company officials say. With these reports, administrators can get an instant view of a company’s messaging use from one central spot and discern trends for resource planning purposes, officials say.

The new tool includes a message-retrieval function that searches for messages based on criteria such as date sent, sender and recipient, and reports on what actions were taken on the message, the company says.

Messaging Reporter is slated for availability in June, pricing has not yet been announced.

In other security news at Interop, Internet Security Systems will announce plans to expand its managed security services offerings at the show with its Security Event Management (SEM) Service. The subscription-based offering would help customers collect, normalize and analyze log data from various devices from security vendors, such as Check Point, Cisco, Juniper, 3Com and McAfee. ISS configures customer security devices such as IDS, IPS, firewalls and gateways to send security log data back to ISS’ data center, eliminating the need for customers to install software or distribute agents for monitoring purposes.

Using this service, customers can either connect to ISS’ Virtual Security Operations Center portal with a user ID and password or opt for a stronger level of authentication with an RSA token. ISS would alert on events that need further attention, take automated actions and suggest remediation. The SEM service can also show over time if a network is experience less security events and becoming a more secure environment, ISS says. Set for general availability Aug. 1, ISS says the company has yet to pin down exact pricing.