Radware's APSolute Attack Prevention Packages IPS, SEM, Consulting

Radware's APSolute Attack Prevention is a combination of Radware's DefensePro appliance, APSolute Vision for threat management including reporting and management, and the Emergency Response Team service. The combination of the three services and products packages the necessary components for attack management. As more data us housed and accessed from off-site locations, the need to protect data over the WAN is critical.

The problem is that the WAN is changing from fixed point-to-point connections to dynamic connections from hosts and networks near and far. The increased use of web services and cloud services for applications and storage compounds the issue. Often, upper management is unaware of the problem or think they are adequately protected. The upshot is that your WAN usage is evolving and your security strategy needs to evolve along with it.

Securing the WAN is not new. Virtual private networks that encrypt network-to-network or host-to-network traffic, such as IPsec and PPTP, have been in use for years. The VPN traffic is protected from prying eyes while other side effects, such as hiding non-routeable IP addresses from the Internet, are an additional benefit. However, the threats and attacks that are hitting today's organizations occur at applications layers not inspected by firewalls.

"The people at the top have no idea of what the current threat landscape is like. In fact, when my branch tried to report an intrusion to headquarters, we were told that such a thing could not have happened because the company has a firewall. The level of ignorance is actually stunning," an IT administrator lamented in a response to our 2010 InformationWeek Analytics' Strategic Security Survey.

DefensePro integrates intrustion prevention, network behavior anomaly detection and denial of service detection and prevention. DefensePro runs on Radware's OnDemand switch platform and can support up to 12Gb/s throughput. Radware claims that DefensePro can  detect and mitigate new threats in real time without impacting legitimate traffic and without human intervention. While that sounds great, we'd recommend having a person review the event anyway just to make sure the attack is valid.Using APSolute Vision for real-time monitoring and reporting should enable IT to validate an attack is taking place and take action quickly. Vision is a security management system than can support multiple DefensePro devices and can correlate and report on attacks. Data viewed through a dashboard provides a real-time overview of network and attack status. Vision also has compliance reporting capabilities, as well.

The Emergency Response Team service provides much needed expertise and advice on identifying and mitigating attacks. Unless the organization has a large IT shop that can afford to staff dedicated security professionals, chances are your security department is staffed with people doing double duty. Having access to expertise will be a real benefit to new and seasoned security professionals alike. In addition, the Emergency Response Team can also provide guidance on configuring and Radware products to maximize attack detection and mitigation.

APSolute Attack Prevention start at $12,500.