"Viruses, malware, and trojans" -- if this were the $25,000 Pyramid game show (I could be showing my age here), a contestant might reply with something like, "These are bad things that can infect a PC while surfing the Internet." And they'd be right.
There are many endpoint security solutions on the market that focus on detection and clean up of these types of security breaches. But Dell is taking a different approach to security by looking to proactively contain these types of threats before they ever become a problem.
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Back in February, Dell announced it was expanding its systems management offerings with innovative solutions that would provide customers with simple-to-use tools and comprehensive control for their daily operations. This expansion would be aided by its acquisition of Kace, a systems management appliance company that provided solutions for endpoint security, device discovery, system inventory, asset management, and even an application virtualization offering.
Dell Kace has applied that application virtualization technology to Mozilla Firefox and is offering corporations what it claims is a more secure form of Internet browsing.
The new Dell Kace Secure Browser technology provides users with a virtual instance of an Internet browser application. By running the browser in a virtual instance, or sandbox environment, the application and any activity resulting from its use are separated from the endpoint, keeping the actual computer and operating system free of any hostile changes that could occur.
With the Dell Kace Secure Browser, you can:
- use a virtualized and contained Firefox v3.6 browser with Adobe Reader and Flash plug-in;
- rapidly reset any changes made during normal use back to their initial state, enabling easy recovery from infections or attacks;
- view statistics related to the number of processes detected and blocked; and
- set white and black lists to limit access to known good sites, or prevent access to known bad sites to further limit the risk of attack and infection.
For as long as application virtualization has been around (and for what little media coverage or general discussion this technology gets), security through isolation still remains one of its best-use cases.