Unified Security Gateway

The Internet has Changed

Ten years ago, the Web was pretty much a one-way communications channel. But then users decided they wanted a more participatory relationship with the Internet. E-mail branched out into chat. Chat evolved into web conferencing and voice over IP. Websites sprouted blogs, which in turn sprouted videologs (vlogs). Then along came social networks, entire communications real-time environments that enabled users to exchange information using all of these collaborative technologies.

Web 2.0 is a complex landscape that's alive with participation and collaboration. Hundreds of social networking sites are available to anyone with a browser. Several have evolved into full-blown development platforms - Facebook alone supports almost 20,000 applications, many of which are communications apps.

Unified Security Gateway - Protection for the Web 2.0 Enterprise

FaceTime's Unified Security Gateway (USG) is a secure Web gateway appliance that enables enterprises to benefit from collaboration and productivity benefits of real-time communications without sacrificing security and control. USG integrates management, security and compliance of Web communications, consumer-driven applications like social networks, public IM, Skype and P2P, and enterprise-class Unified Communications suites like Microsoft's Office Communications Server and IBM Lotus Sametime.

With a single appliance, organizations can enable and enforce the safe and productive use of real-time communications while protecting the corporate network against malware, mitigating data leak risks, and ensuring compliance with corporate, regulatory and e-discovery requirements.

The Unified Security Gateway integrates FaceTime's best in class malware protection, Web filtering, and compliance management technologies into a purpose-built, hardened appliance. With this single point of control, organizations can gain visibility into all real-time communications and reduce the total cost of ownership with simple IT administration.

USG enables enterprises to:

• Manage access to and use of applications within social networking sites like Facebook according to established acceptable use policies
  • Lower the risks from inbound threats and outbound data leakage
  • Meet employee needs without impacting productivity or security
  • Maintain regulatory compliance through logging and archival
• Keep protection on track with dynamic updates of new social networking sites and applications hosted by those sites
• Benefit from a single point for enablement, access management, security and control for web and real-time channels
• Lower total cost of ownership with a truly integrated solution that provides enablement and enforcement of policies across all real-time communications channels
• Protect investment in security today by providing a platform on which future web-borne threat prevention can be built

Social Networking - New Benefits and New Risks

Social networking activities in today's enterprise run the full gamut of communications and collaborations - from games to blogging, from photo-sharing to chatting, from posting opinions to downloading applications. It's common practice for candidates' social networking activities to be reviewed as part of the hiring process, and social networks have become an always-on focus group for testing and reviewing new ideas.

But all this openness and collaboration between social and business networks also means many more opportunities for malware to get into the corporate network - and intellectual property to leak out.

Left unsecured and unmanaged, the widespread use of social networking can:

• Compromise network security from malware spread through port-hopping real-time communications channels
• Create holes for information leakage, resulting in the loss of confidential information, intellectual property and privacy issues
• Increase help desk calls and support costs when malware gets through

And then there are the additional productivity issues resulting from non-business-related use of social networks during the workday.

Key Features:

Real-time communications security

• Dynamically filter millions of websites and URLs using industry standard, regularly updated databases
• Gain visibility and control over hundreds of IM applications and aggregators, P2P networks, and Facebook applications
• Protect corporate networks against SpIM, spyware, rootkits, and botnets entering through the gateway
• Control file and image transfers over public IM networks and scan using existing anti-virus tools
• Block bandwidth-sapping day-zero worms with challenge-response and message throttling
• Enforce corporate acceptable usage policies for web and real-time communications access
• Block access to infected websites, including in Skype chat sessions
• Prevent IP address exposure by blocking direct client-to-client connections
• Prevent web-based threats propagating through social networks
• Prevent users from visiting known spyware infection sites
• Detect and report on evasive application behavior

Management

• Visibility into all real-time communications channels and social networking sites
• Unified reporting across all web and real-time communications channels ensures compliance with corporate and regulatory requirements
• Detailed reports on all web-channel activities
• Granular control at group and user levels for location-independent policy enforcement
• Prevent circumvention of UC platforms
• Unified policy management and enforcement for all real-time Internet activities
• Leverage directory structures for policy enforcement at user/group levels
• Integration with existing infrastructure with zero latency
• Pre-defined and customizable reports in multiple output formats
• Secure management console for centralized configuration, management, and reporting
• Scalability through support for external database for policies, logging and archival
• Location-aware policy enforcement using endpoint IP addresses
• Map public IM buddy names to user names in enterprise directory

Download the FaceTime Unified Security Gateway data sheet.