Wick Hill announces the availability of the latest version of WatchGuard® Technology’s extensible threat management (XTM) family of multifunction firewalls. In this latest release of the XTM operating system, administrators gain the ability to manage search capabilities, as well as gain additional application control features to manage the explosive-growth landscape of web applications.
With the new WatchGuard Safe Search feature, administrators can manage and enforce search engine filtering settings to ensure users, and in particular children, do not see inappropriate content in their search results.
By setting this option at the XTM firewall gateway, administrators override whatever preference users set in their web browser. WatchGuard Safe Search works with leading search engines, including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com. Additionally, the safe search feature enforces “safety mode” on YouTube to filter out and remove objectionable content or comments.
Ian Kilpatrick, chairman of Wick Hill Group, commented: “The excellent Safe Search feature allows organisations in the public, educational, private and charity sectors to easily meet their legal requirements to protect children and staff from deliberate or inadvertent access to inappropriate and objectionable content. This provides excellent competitive and margin opportunities for the channel.”
With this new XTM release, WatchGuard further enhances its application control functionality. Now, administrators can manage more than 1,800 applications, which squarely positions WatchGuard Application Control above any competitive UTM or Next Generation Firewall.
Notable additions include identification of Android and iPhone mobile phone browsers, and popular social networking and web 2.0 applications from around the world, such as Viadeo (France), Tuenti (Spain), Hyves (Netherlands) and Mixi.jp (Japan).
Additionally, administrators will appreciate new user interface controls that simplify common tasks, including applying application actions to multiple policies and setting policy by application category. Rules by category are automatically updated to include any new applications that are added to a category as part of regular signature updates.
Finally, policy, VPN and SNMP enhancements further round-out this latest software release, making WatchGuard firewalls even easier to use and yet, more capable of protecting networks, applications and data than ever before.
