New technologies creates new opportunities

Sorry for just copying the press release but I think this is very interesting.

Jericho Forum Challenge winner AppGate makes information security accessible to everyone for free

AppGate’s security server, designed to provide security in an open-network environment, is now available as a free virtualized server

Stockholm, 21 April 2009 – AppGate Network Security a leader in network access control and information security has launched the AppGate Free Edition (AFE), a free-to-use version of the AppGate security server and part of the recently launched V9.0 family, which will be demonstrated at this year’s InfoSecurity Europe. The AFE is a fully functional, virtualized version of the AppGate security server that can run on almost any virtual platform, for example VMware. AppGate takes a different approach to information security, as advocated by Jericho Forum, and the AppGate solution is designed to address the challenges of securing data and applications in an open, Internet-driven world. With the AFE, every organisation now has access to this technology.

Organisations are dependent more than ever on use of the Internet, for flexible working for employees, collaboration with partners, and taking advantage of services in “the cloud”. While there are potentially huge benefits, there are also considerable risks. Jericho Forum, the high level independent user group that is leading the way in analysing the security issues and raising awareness, called for a new approach to information security moving away from border-centric mechanisms to enable the secure flow of data over the Internet. The AppGate solution embodies much of this thinking, moving security as close as possible to the source.

“AppGate was a worthy winner of the Jericho Forum challenge four years ago and continues to follow many of the Jericho Forum design principles, championing the cause of open source” said Ian Dobson, Director of the Jericho Forum.

AppGate has developed a real solution to the challenge of securing IT architecture in today’s open-collaboration environment, and it runs on OpenSolaris, a UNIX-based operating system.” In AppGate's solution, the central firewall is replaced by a set of distributed firewalls that are installed on all clients and servers. These firewalls are centrally controlled and configured dynamically to allow or deny traffic on the network. Making AppGate’s security server available on the OpenSolaris operating system is consistent with its corporate rollout strategy, and AppGate regards it as the next phase of evolution in the IT security market.

“At AppGate we have always been a great supporter of the principles of open source”, says Tomas Olovsson CTO of AppGate. “MindTerm, one of our products has been available as source code and free of charge for personal and limited commercial use for many years. By launching the AppGate Free Edition we are following the same principle, giving people the unique opportunity to freely test and use the functionality of the AppGate solution even in smaller commercial environments.”

AppGate will be demonstrating the V9.0 security server at InfoSecurity Europe on stand R70 between April 28th and April 30th. AppGate won the first Jericho Forum Challenge in 2005 with a paper entitled “Balancing the Equation; Enterprises moving to the de-perimeterised world need to adopt a ‘core’ mentality based on controlled access to systems”.

As always AppGate security servers build on existing proven functionality such as:

Application Layer Firewall
Mobile & Fixed VPN
Granular & Role based Access
End-point Security Control