Member Article

WatchGuard visibility tools take fight to hackers

WatchGuard have announced a variety of visibility and ease-of-use enhancements to its award-winning threat intelligence platform, WatchGuard Dimension®. This release also allows customers to preview several brand new network control features designed to make it possible for IT administrators to translate network visibility into immediate action.

“Over the years WatchGuard has brought a number of game-changing innovations to the marketplace, and Dimension continues that tradition of innovation and bringing solutions to our customers that they can put to use immediately,” said Prakash Panjwani, president and CEO, WatchGuard. “Visibility is security and by distilling oceans of data into the thimbleful of information that matters in real time, we’ve set the bar for how our customers expect to see and stop threats in their networks.”

The company’s Dimension platform aggregates data from all WatchGuard appliances across a customer’s network and translates that data into visually rich and actionable threat intelligence. This release builds on the platform’s award-winning visibility capabilities with increased performance, detailed system health reports, and new, visually stunning cyberloafing dashboards.

Dimension is intended to not only help identify security risks but to also enable IT pros to rapidly mitigate those risks. Dimension Command, a premium add-on to Dimension slated for release in late 2015, will unlock instant network control and security configuration capabilities within the platform. With the current release, WatchGuard is offering a preview to a subset of those control features including one-click configuration changes, the ability to ‘jump back’ to previous configurations, direct access to individual appliances through a web UI, and VPN management tools.

“WatchGuard has demonstrated an ongoing commitment to delivering easy-to-use solutions for empowering IT administrators to monitor and protect their networks. The addition of control features to our Dimension platform will take that power to the next level. We are excited to allow customers to preview some of that power with this release and look forward to constantly adding more features to this platform, which has received rave reviews from analysts and customers alike,” Panjwani continued.

Dimension is offered standard with all WatchGuard Unified Threat Management (UTM) and Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) appliances, with the purchase of the company’s support service*.

Below is a complete list of enhancements made available with the release of Dimension 2.0:

Enhanced UI Throughout: With input from thousands of users worldwide, a new, brighter design with UI modifications makes it even easier, faster and more intuitive to spot problems and make changes.

Cyberloafing Dashboards: Bandwidth and time quotas now more robustly display how and where employees are spending their time.

Role-Based Privileges: Not everyone should have access to everything. Dimension now makes it easier to choose pre-defined roles and groups, or to create your own roles or groups – putting control of the right policies in the hands of the right teams.

Hub and Spoke VPN: Setting up a secure connection to the branch office has never been easier. Customers can now establish and manage VPN tunnels quickly and easily.

One-Click to Take Action: With Dimension Command, IT pros now have the ability to take immediate action to block IP addresses or domain names that are threatening their networks. A single click and they’re blocked immediately.

Direct Access to Individual Firewalls: Having immediate access to an individual firewall makes it quick and easy to take action and make policy changes.

Configuration Histories: Policies are the brains of a firewall, and as soon as a user spots issues, they can quickly scan recent policies and/or revert back to a previous configuration.

Health Reports: While it’s critical to see threats, it’s also critical to know that your network security systems are performing well and not at risk of failure. Dimension Command lets you see your CPU, memory and physical interface usage at a glance and drill down as necessary to make adjustments.

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