Protego Releases Industry’s First Enterprise-Class Threat Mitigation Appliance With Distributed Processing

MILPITAS, CA – October 26, 2004 — Protego Networks, Inc., the leading provider of enterprise threat mitigation appliances, today announced the availability of the PN-MARS GC appliance which automates global security threat mitigation, response coordination, and compliance reporting using distributed processing. The solution enables centralized management and monitoring of an organization’s security posture by coordinating the efforts of multiple distributed PN-MARS threat mitigation appliances. With the introduction of the MARS GC (Global Controller), Protego now offers the industry’s broadest, most scalable family of threat mitigation appliances. Protego exceeds where all other security information management (SIM) vendors fall short of meeting customer expectations.

“The MARS GC simplifies and alleviates scalability issues associated with the management of a large enterprise’s network security infrastructure,” said Scott Gordon, vice president of marketing at Protego Networks. “Our integrated appliance enables global threat visualization providing an enterprise topology view of hotspots with instant incident drill-down for validation, path analysis, and action. Armed with this timely insight, operators can identify connected events spanning networks and rapidly launch countermeasures. In addition, enterprise-wide investigation, queries and compliance reporting are faster and further automated because the processing is distributed to local MARS appliances. ”

PN-MARS GC is the industry’s first threat mitigation appliance with distributed processing to enable administrators to centrally view and take coordinated action against enterprise-wide incidents. The system centrally manages complex distributed rules and queries, reporting templates, access controls, configurations, and updates leveraging local threat mitigation appliances. As the local PN-MARS appliances execute queries and rules across the enterprise, the results are efficiently rolled up and consolidated for rapid and centralized analysis at the PN-MARS GC.

“Defense-in-depth can unfortunately become operationally complex; whereby the Protego solution enables us to manage serious information security issues in dramatically less time, with much greater detail, and with current resources,” said Jim Hammond, manager of network services, New Jersey Office of Information Technology. “The Protego MARS family enables us to be effective at incident workflow and compliance reporting requirements, as well as to accurately see or investigate enterprise-wide security and network threats and take immediate, informed action right from the GC console. We have found that Protego’s WAN scalability and mitigation is extremely powerful.”

PN-MARS GC (Global Controller)
PN-MARS GC works in concert with Protego’s entire family of threat mitigation appliances. All PN-MARS threat mitigation appliances utilize patent-pending Protego technology to transform raw network and security data into actionable network intelligence critical to subvert real security incidents and maintain compliance requirements. PN-MARS GC provides hierarchical MARS management and scaling of multiple appliance threat visualization, rule distribution, and advanced analysis. It further centralizes expansive security operations to provide a single view of the entire enterprises, disseminate access privileges, configurations, customized rules, and coordinate investigations with accelerated queries and reporting. Processing is dispersed among local PN-MARS appliances – all powered by an intuitive global management console.

“Corporations are spending large dollars to secure the infrastructure, put out fires, and answer compliance audit reviews,” said Chris Christiansen, vice president of security at IDC Research. “We see the convergence of security information management, vulnerability assessment, and remediation capabilities as imperative market growth drivers. Protego’s solution follows this vision and the GC release aligns the vendor among those offering scalable, enterprise-class solutions.”

The MARS GC appliance consists of a 4U rack mountable platform utilizing dual Intel Xeon??Ӣ processors, a web-based user interface, hardened OS, embedded Oracle database, proprietary logic, and scalable architecture. Like all Protego appliances, the MARS GC offers the following advanced threat mitigation features:

– Event correlation and data consolidation supporting an array of popular network and security devices, applications, operating systems, and Netflow
– Predefined rules, complex rules and support for rule customization and free-form query
– Real-time, drill-down attack path visualization and investigation with complete rule, MAC address, and raw event details
– Predefined, customizable and scheduled reports for audit, compliance and trending
– Dashboard with asset grouping and naming to facilitate management by business relevance
– Roles-based administration with intuitive workflow supporting case-centric investigations, annotations and reports
– Universal device support integrating any application syslog feed into the appliance
– Full replay and rapid investigation of both real-time and dated incidents
– Continuous archive of consolidated events to common NAS storage

Pricing and Availability
Protego’s solutions are available through a network of authorized security system integration channels worldwide. PN-MARS GC is shipping with prices starting at $30,000 for the MARS GC-m model, designed for mid-tier applications; and $60,000 for the MARS GC model for large enterprises. The product has passed extensive performance, reliability and integration tests with leading network and security devices and software applications. Pricing for the PN-MARS family ranges from $10,000 to $90,000 with different performance characteristics to satisfy remote, medium, large and expansive enterprises. Protego’s solutions deliver correlation, visualization, investigation and mitigation capabilities without any additional servers, host agents, database administration, or integration costs.

About Protego
Protego Networks Inc. is the leading provider of enterprise threat mitigation appliances empowering companies to readily identify, manage and eliminate network attacks, and maintain compliance. Protego’s PN-MARS appliance family fortifies deployed network devices and security countermeasures by combining network intelligence, ContextCorrelation??”¢, SureVector??”¢ analysis and AutoMitigate??”¢ capability in a high performance appliance to subvert real security incidents. Protego’s scalable appliances provide cost-effective and easily deployed solutions to prevent, understand and even stop sophisticated threats, network outbreak, and system breaches. Protego exceeds where all other security information management (SIM) vendors fall short of meeting customer expectations. Protego’s appliances integrate and consolidate security event information from leading security products and currently protect financial services, manufacturing, utilities, health industry, managed services, and government organizations worldwide. For more information, visit www.protegonetworks.com..

TRADEMARKS: Protego Networks, Protego Logo, PN-MARS, Big Red Button, Enterprise Threat Mitigation, ContextCorrelation, AutoMitigate, and SureVector are trademarks of Protego Networks, Inc. Other names mentioned may be trademarks and properties of their respective owners.