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Sourcefire Announces Next-Generation Firewalls
| Dec 6, 2011 | Enterprise Security
| Analyst: Andrew Braunberg
Event Summary
December 5, 2011 -- Sourcefire announced its next-generation firewall (NGFW). Building on Sourcefire’s next-generation IPS (NGIPS) technology and leveraging its high-performance FirePOWER platform, Sourcefire’s next-generation firewall combines IPS threat prevention, integrated application control, and firewall capabilities in a high-performance security appliance. By combining NGIPS and NGFW, Sourcefire created the first enterprise firewall solution with comprehensive enterprise visibility, adaptive security, and advanced threat protection.
Quick Take
Analytical Summary
• Current Perspective: Positive on Sourcefire’s upcoming release of next-generation firewall products, because they expand the company’s functional footprint and provide additional options for existing customers and prospects. Sourcefire also enhanced much of its core technology: for example, rewriting its inspection engine, user interface and reporting engine.
• Vendor Importance: Very high to Sourcefire, because these new next-generation firewall (NGFW) offerings consolidate years of research and development work. The company’s long-term fortunes will be closely tied to market acceptance of its NGFW products. Furthermore, these initial releases (due later this month) deliver on specific promises that Sourcefire made to its customers more than a year ago.
• Market Impact: Moderate on the security gateway markets, because Sourcefire is a long-time innovator in the IPS market, but with these releases, the company is more keeping pace with broader market trends than leading them. Competitors have also been anticipating these products since Sourcefire outlined its strategic direction just about a year ago.
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SOURCEFIRE INTRODUCES INDUSTRY’S FIRST NEXT-GENERATION FIREWALL WITH INTEGRATED NEXT-GENERATION IPS
New Universal Platform Surpasses Existing Solutions with Increased Awareness, Automation and the Industry’s Best Threat Prevention
Wokingham, UK – December 5, 2011 -- Sourcefire, Inc. (Nasdaq: FIRE), a leader in intelligent cybersecurity solutions, today announced its latest innovation, the Sourcefire Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW). Building on Sourcefire’s Next-Generation IPS(NGIPS) technology leadership and leveraging its high-performance FirePOWER™ platform, the Sourcefire Next-Generation Firewall combines the world’s most powerful IPS threat prevention, integrated application control and firewall capabilities in a high-performance security appliance. By combining NGIPS and NGFW, Sourcefire has created the first enterprise firewall solution with comprehensive enterprise visibility, adaptive security and advanced threat protection.
"Threats continue to advance, and network security defences must evolve to become effective against advanced targeted threats. Enterprises should require vendors to add next-generation intrusion prevention features to network security products," said Greg Young, Research Vice President, Gartner1. "Mainstream enterprises over time will refresh existing next-generation firewall deployments with future versions with next-generation network IPS capabilities."
Applying its Agile Security™ vision to the emerging NGFW market, Sourcefire is delivering a context-aware and adaptive NGFW solution to offer its customers superior network protection and control without compromise. The Sourcefire Next-Generation Firewall provides this increased protection by combining the ability to identify and provide granular control for more than 1,000 applications with unprecedented visibility, intelligent automation and industry-best threat prevention effectiveness. These capabilities are all backed by the elite Sourcefire Vulnerability Research Team (VRT™) and the company’s collective security intelligence.
Universal Network Security Platform
Sourcefire leverages a single-pass engine that delivers deep inspection while maintaining peak performance. The FirePOWER platform can be configured at the customer’s discretion as an NGIPS, an NGIPS with application control or an NGFW, providing the customer ultimate flexibility to deploy appliances to match their infrastructure needs and scale over time.
Total Visibility
Using its patented FireSIGHT™ technology, Sourcefire delivers increased visibility into applications, users, content, hosts, attacks, vulnerabilities, behaviour and changes in a user’s environment. It then correlates this information with user identity and reputation intelligence to assess risks and threat impact to make more precise enforcement decisions.
Intelligent Automation
Unlike existing solutions, the Sourcefire Next-Generation Firewall employs intelligent security automation to increase the agility of protection efforts that can keep pace with constantly changing environments. This is accomplished by the Sourcefire NGFW through comprehensive contextual awareness and collective threat intelligence that result in more meaningful policy recommendations and automated adjustments to a customer’s defence in real time. It also allows security teams to optimize remediation efforts by reducing actionable alerts and filtering out events that do not affect the particular user’s environment.
Control Without Compromise
Sourcefire NGFW provides control without compromising threat prevention. Based on independent testing, the solution delivers best-of-class throughput performance and advanced threat detection with unsurpassed blocking effectiveness. As with other Sourcefire solutions, the NGFW allows users to tailor and customize defences and policies to their specific environment.
“As enterprises seek to increase their protection efforts they are looking for solutions that offer the agility to be effective in the face of modern threats,” said Martin Roesch, Chief Technology Officer at Sourcefire. “Other NGFW solutions force customers to make tradeoffs between control, prevention, performance and manageability. The Sourcefire Next-Generation Firewall includes our industry-leading NGIPS and provides the user the power and confidence to prevent and respond to complex threats with the granular control required today.”
