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These gateways offer centralized management of security functions and some useful features, but actual security performance was lackluster.
Security vendors have been incorporating functions such as firewall and virtual private networks (VPN) into their products for some time, but it's only recently that we've been able to test products that incorporated three or more functions. We were interested in finding out what was gained-or lost-by consolidating security functions into one unit, rather than having several security devices devoted to discrete functions throughout the network.
This past April, Miercom invited vendors that offer "security gateways" to participate in a competitive review. We defined security gateways as products that incorporate at least two, but preferably three or more security functions, including firewall, VPN, content filtering, ability to detect denial of service (DoS) attacks, anti-virus and intrusion detection.
Participating vendors had to submit their security gateway, along with any additional or special hardware or software, including management packages or performance accelerators, which might be necessary to test the full functionality of the product.
Five vendors answered the call and four were tested competitively at Miercom's lab during May and June. Their comparative ratings are shown in the scorecard in Table 1, and details are in Table 2, pp. 23. The participating vendors were:
* CyberGuard Corp. (Fort Lauderdale, FL), which entered its SL3200, version 5.1 PSU1 and CyberGuard GUI, version 5.1.1.
* Fortinet Inc. (Santa Clara, CA), which submitted its FortiGate 3000, FortiOS version 2.36. (Fortinet is coming out with a new release of software, which will be available at the time this review is published.)
* ServGate Technologies (Milpitas, CA), which entered its EdgeForce Plus, version 2.60, and Web-based GUI that operates on Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.5 or higher.
* Symantec Corp. (Cupertino, CA), which came in with its beta version of the Symantec Gateway Security (SGS) 5460 and the SGS Management Interface, version 2.0. According to Symantec, the SGS 5460 will be generally available some time in the fourth quarter.
* Nokia Internet Communications (Mountain View, CA) entered its IP350, which could not be compared "apples-to-apples" against the other four products. We have discussed this product in a sidebar.
All the products tested were rack-mountable devices running proprietary software, and all are targeted to...