Member Article

WatchGuard tackles 'cyberloafing' with latest Fireware OS

WatchGuard Technologies, a global leader in multi-function firewalls, has announced the newest version of its agile Fireware® Operating System will make it easy to control the amount of data employees have access to, when and for how long, tackling a host of issues arising from unproductive online habits.

According to LearnStuff.com it’s estimated that organisations lose as much as £3,000 per employee every year due to “cyberloafing” or “time crime.”

“Most companies realise that employees perform better with a breather and limited non-work-related activity, but the key is to find a balance between the two,” said Brendan Patterson, director of product management for WatchGuard. “Our newest version of Fireware OS, 11.10, makes it easy for IT professionals to find the right mix by setting time and data quotas to ensure employees are happy without compromising productivity.”

Fireware’s new quota capabilities also extend to WatchGuard’s guest access features. This allows hospitality and retail organisations to set parameters for guest access – ensuring no one guest can negatively affect the performance of the network for others.

The value is already clear for beta customers of the new Fireware OS upgrade. “It’s excellent,” said Jack Estes, managing partner at Aegis Technologies Partners. “For a relatively small company, this had immediate impact on productivity.”

In addition to the time and data quota features, the new software also allows network administrators to set policies for websites using names not numbers, including a “wildcard” ability to conveniently cover multiple domains with one policy.

“Using names not numbers is not only easier and more intuitive for IT pros to set policies, our wildcard functionality means they can catch all IP addresses within a given domain without having to set policies for each one,” said Patterson. “A good example would be icanhas.cheezburger.com, memebase.cheezburger.com, failblog.cheezburger.com, it goes on and on. Having that wildcard ability to collectively capture all those sites gives the IT professional tons of efficiency in putting policies against particular groups of websites.”

Patterson adds that Fireware’s ‘names not numbers’ functionality also takes considerably less processing power than competing solutions because WatchGuard does not do a reverse look up during each transaction to update IP addresses. “While our solution has the processing horsepower, it’s not necessary to waste it on this function. WatchGuard’s approach is a much more efficient use of resources,” notes Patterson.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by WatchGuard Technologies .