Sygate strengthens end-point defenses

It seems a lot of people are confused about end-point security these days. Good thing Sygate isn't. The company's updated and renamed end-point security suite, Sygate Enterprise Protection (SEP) 5.0, incorporates several interesting and welcome enhancements, including Determina's "memory firewall" technology to provide host-based intrusion-prevention for Windows servers.

The integration of Determina technology helps provide what Sygate is calling Universal Buffer Overflow protection, which guards against buffer, heap, stack-overflow, and code-injection attacks. Determina's memory firewall brings defenses to Windows servers that go beyond what Sygate's personal firewall provides to client end-points.

Also new in SEP is more granular control over the use of USB devices. SEP can block reads, writes, and code execution from specific devices, including several types of portable and non-portable drives, such as the ubiquitous CD/DVD burner.

Like its forerunner, Sygate Secure Enterprise, SEP still has a solid policy underpinning. Policy enforcement can change depending on whether the host agent detects a change in media type -- from wired to wireless, for example. The Sygate Policy Manager sports a completely redesigned user interface. The end-point agent and SEP server are also now performing mutual authentication to enhance communications security.

You can also add increased scalability to the list of interesting enhancements. According to Sygate, a single SEP-management server can now handle more than 700,000 hosts. This is impressive, but I currently lack the ability to test that many end-points in the lab, even though I run VMware. In addition, Sygate enhanced its database to handle all of this end-point traffic without requiring a separate SQL server. However, if you want to run a separate SQL engine and server, SEP will handle that, too.

So far, I haven’t really seen any flaws under the hood of this new version, except for a small hike in the per-seat price. I will, however, shake it out shortly when I take it for a full spin around the track, and I'll report back to you about any possible shortcomings this end-point security solution may have.

Sygate Enterprise Protection 5.0

Sygate

Cost: Starts at $65 per seat for desktops and laptops; $115 per seat for servers

Available: Now