NetGear Offers SMBs Web and E-Mail Security

NetGear announced the launch of its new line of security threat management products, delivering what it calls enterprise-level security solutions to small and medium-size businesses.

Aimed directly at businesses and delivered via the company's reseller partners, the STM Series of Web and E-mail Threat Management Appliances is NetGear's first family of products to be introduced under its ProSecure brand.

"An SMB often has folks doing whatever they want, downloading, bit torrents, you name it, and because they're doing that, it exposes the organization to attack," said Jason Leung, Netsenior product line manager for SMB security. "With all these different Web applications that SMBs are heavily reliant upon today, there are also other challenges."

Leung said the ProSecure series sets a new bar for SMB security management. The STM deploys in-line in a matter of minutes, anywhere behind the network firewall. There is no need to reconfigure mail servers or Web proxies, unlike traditional proxy-based security solutions, and administration is performed through an intuitive Web-based interface. The series offers three platforms, each with a different level of horsepower, to accommodate businesses with up to 600 concurrent users. The STM150, STM300 and STM600 all contain the same security functionality with increasing amounts of bandwidth to support various-sized SMBs.
SMBs can set granular policies and alerts, check summary statistics and graphical reports, drill down to IP address-level data and integrate log data with standard network management tools such as SNMP. "The challenge the market has not yet met is that SMBs have the same security needs as the enterprise," Leung said. "SMBs are faced with security solutions which are not ideal for what they need to do."

The STM Series features a full enterprise grade anti-malware engine with advanced scanning algorithms and a signature library of hundreds of thousands of malware signatures. Leung says compared to many competing products that often use a very limited signature set for performance reasons (thousands versus hundreds of thousands of signatures), the difference in coverage is more than a hundred fold, allowing a vast array of viruses, spyware and other malware to be detected and blocked. Spyware phone home downloads are also stopped by the STM Series, preventing further infection and protecting your business information.

"Delivering a solution that meets these criteria is a challenging prospect. In order to meet profit margin requirements, other vendors targeting SMBs often use 'watered down' anti-spam engines that require laborious on-site tuning, anti-virus engines that contain only limited signature databases, weak detection algorithms, have slow response times to new threats, and are not optimized for real-time Web traffic," Leung said. "We have found a way to deliver SMBs cost-effective, enterprise-class security with significant ease-of-use."

While the global economic downturn has businesses of all sizes tightening belts, Leung said businesses understand the importance of security and said NetGear's pricing is extremely competitive. "The security market generally moves slightly reverse in a down economy," he says. "In a recession, security needs go up because attacks go up, and I think SMBs understand that."