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Microsoft has launched two enhancements to its security offerings and revealed a strategy shift that could further shake up the competition in the antivirus sector.

The company made the second beta of its Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) available for download. This follows its release of Forefront Security for Exchange Server Service Pack 1 (SP1).

Microsoft announced Beta 2 of TMG in a blog by Bill Jensen, senior product manager for TMG.

The product will focus on Web security and Microsoft is positioning TMG to possibly replace antivirus packages from other vendors in the enterprise.

“With TMG customers can continue working with existing antivirus vendors, but they can consolidate their AV products by replacing them with TMG if they want,” Jensen said.

But TMG’s threat goes beyond that — together with Forefront Security for Exchange Server SP1, it provides a large security blanket. “Threat Management Gateway protects virtual private networks and traffic coming into the company, while Forefront Security for Exchange Server protects e-mails,” Don Retallack, research vice president at Directions on Microsoft, which focuses solely on Microsoft, told InternetNews.com.

More at http://www.enterpriseitplanet.com/security/

Microsoft security beta, threat-management, tmg

Bell Microproducts Inc. is the global well known value-added distributors of storage and computing technology has announced that it has signed a distribution agreement with Elitecore Technologies to distribute its Cyberoam Unified Threat Management (UTM) appliances.

Cyberoam is an industry leading identity-enabled UTM range of appliances from Elitecore Technologies. The new agreement with Bell Micro will enable Cyberoam to strengthen its reach into the North American market while meeting the growing demand for security solutions across organizations in the region. Under the terms of the agreement, Bell Micro will distribute the complete Cyberoam line of UTM appliances, including the SOHO-SMB focused CR25i and CR50i, the mid-market oriented CR100i, CR250i and CR500i and CR1000i and CR1500i, which cater to large enterprises.

The only identity-based UTM appliance worldwide, Cyberoam offers the most comprehensive security set over a single platform — stateful inspection firewall, VPN, gateway anti-virus, gateway anti-spam, gateway anti-malware, intrusion prevention system (IPS), content filtering, bandwidth management (QoS), multiple link management and enhanced user-based reporting. Cyberoam UTM appliances are unique in providing total visibility into individual user activity within the enterprise network, delivering robust network security through control over user activity. At a time when current UTMs still offer IP-address based security, Cyberoam is the only UTM solution that offers user identity-based security, protecting enterprises from emerging new threats.

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In China, UTM (Unified Threats Management) has been rocketing in recent months, not only in the media, but also in the real market transactions. International vendors, such as Fortinet, Watchguard, Sonicwall, ZyXel, bomb the newspapers, journals and other soft-ad everyday, while Cisco, Juniper, Symantec, Securecomputing, McAfee and etc. keep talking on their vision of UTM directions. Of course, the prediction of IDC’s report on UTM market that UTM will occupy 57.6% of total firewall, vpn, and anti-virus market share is one of the main stir and encouragement to the investment. Then, how is everything going about those local security vendors? Yes, they won’t just stand by and watch the growth, instead they are deeply involved in this arena.

During the past 1-2 years, most of those major players in China security market have been brewing and rolling-out their UTM products. Kingsoft is one of the top three local anti-virus vendors in China(the other two is Rising and Jiangmin). Recently, they inked the agreement with xScreen on the UTM product OEM cooperation. In conjunction with their desktop antivirus/firewall/IDS, anti-virus gateway and server protection, no one would like to ignor their competition in the total security solution for SMB.

According to the UTM description by IDC, anti-virus is one basic function of UTM devices, ie. it’s easier for those anti-virus vendors to turn to catch up UTM market. So it’s an easy job to predict that Rising/Jiangmin/CA-JC won’t wait long time to sell their UTM.

As to the UTM market, OEM is doomed to be a good choice for those vendors who want to break into this market. Because a single core technology within a UTM, such as firewall, VPN, IDS engine, and anti-virus engine, is a little bit overwhelming for an average vendor to develop from the much beginning. As a proof of my point, IDC’s report list reflect the anti-virus engine OEMed in the major UTM products. So again it’s easy to predict there are more and more vendors choose OEM to enhance their features and shorten the rolling-out time. It must leave such technology companies as xScreen a big space to make money and grow.

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