Check Point airs six-month plan

Check Point has laid out a six-month plan for how it intends to help companies beef up security for Web-based remote access as well as internal corporate networks, although details of the plan remain sketchy.

BOSTON – Check Point has laid out a six-month plan for how it intends to help companies beef up security for Web-based remote access as well as internal corporate networks, although details of the plan remain sketchy.

A new product family called Web Security will be designed to unify Internet remote access technologies to enable the most appropriate levels of access and security for each machine that attempts to log on to a network. Another new product family, Internal Security, would segment networks to contain attacks and block them more effectively before they can take hold.

Check Point Chairman and CEO Gil Shwed says the products will borrow from the company’s existing VPN and firewall offerings but require “new innovations” as well, such as the ability to contain attacks within network segments (Read a Q&A with Shwed).

On the Web security front, Shwed says that currently to grant a broad mix of access methods and security levels, companies might need to install Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) remote access and IP Security VPNs. This could be too cumbersome, he says. “You need a unified approach to get the right level of eligibility and security,” he says. “We don’t want the company to have three solutions for the endpoint.”

Shwed says a form of SSL remote access will be part of Web Security, but the package will go beyond that. “What we’ll be doing will be fairly unique. . . . It will compete [with] and it will replace SSL VPN solutions,” he says.

Check Point’s take on SSL remote access didn’t sit well with one analyst who was briefed. “They brushed over the topic. That signals they don’t have a fully baked solution,” says Jason Wright, an analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

The Web product is expected to provide unified authentication and authorization and let users sign on once to the Check Point device to access applications without having to sign on again to each application server. These are capabilities already found in the company’s UserAuthority product, although Check Point says the new product also will protect Web servers from network- and application-layer attacks (a feature of Check Point’s current firewall). The new Web product also will check whether desktop security is properly configured before allowing access, the company says.

Shwed says the Web and Internal products will be sold separately and will work with or without Check Point’s VPN-1/Firewall-1.