Making networking and security even better together

Digital transformation often begins with moving internal applications and data to the cloud. But, old centralized approaches to networking and security can’t handle the load in modern distributed organizations. That’s why many enterprises and government agencies are switching from expensive, private networking infrastructure (often based on MPLS) to commodity, direct-to-internet connectivity. But in doing so, they’re quickly realizing that their security has to change as well.

To help customers deal with both of these challenges, we’ve just released Forcepoint NGFW 6.5, the newest version of the next-generation network security software that powers our physical and virtual firewall, VPN, SD-WAN, and IPS appliances. With release 6.5, distributed organizations can better connect and protect their people and data. It enables ISP links to be optimized more effectively while also using the cloud to secure web content and cloud application data.

Getting Faster Insights into Site Connectivity via Our Enhanced SD-WAN Dashboard

Forcepoint NGFW has long made it easy to connect each store, branch and remote office in an enterprise network via more than one ISP links. We’re one of the few vendors with multiple customers each managing more than a thousand locations from a single console. Now, with release 6.5, you can see at a glance how each link is performing, which links are being used for which applications, and other vital information that enables anomalies to be spotted early before they become problems.

Using the Right Links – and the Right Security – with Application-Aware Routing

Getting the most out of ISPs and private network lines takes more than simply pushing bits over the wire. Now, with release 6.5, applications can be dynamically detected, and their traffic automatically routed to the most appropriate link. In addition, this application-aware approach enables traffic for each app to be forwarded to different cloud-based security services for special scanning and processing. For example:

• Mission-critical traffic (like point-of-sale data or voice over IP communications) can be sent directly over low-latency lines.
• Sanctioned applications (e.g., Office 365) can be sent over high-quality ISP links through a cloud application security broker (CASB) to enforce data protection policies in the cloud.
• Video and general web browsing can be directed over lower-cost ISP links to a secure web gateway in the cloud to protect against malicious content.

You can even mix and match security services with links at whatever level of granularity is needed.

Best of all, this is all expressed using the same access and protection policies that customers are used to using.

Now Available in Our Support Portal

These are just a few of many enhancements that are part of release 6.5. We also now offer auto-scaling for virtual firewalls in both Amazon Web Service and Microsoft Azure to make security easier for DevOps to deploy. And, our user-centric dashboards are even more interactive, giving admins the ability to more rapidly spot potential and remediate potential issues.

Customers can download Forcepoint NGFW 6.5 from the Forcepoint Support Portal.