Feature Story

Network Box USA Managed Security Solutions For Companies That Take Security Seriously

A strong indicator of a company's performance is its track record. Network Box USA's (www.networkboxusa.com) includes accumulating 40-plus international awards with its global managed security solutions, achieving a 98% retention rate among customers who add more security devices later on, and clients citing nine years of bug-free network operation. Such accomplishments come by viewing security as what CTO Pierluigi Stella describes as "constant, continuous engagement 24/7/365." As Stella says, "Hackers never sleep, and neither do we."

Network Box's customers include 150 financial institutions in the United States alone. Clinics, hospitals, businesses subject to PCI DSS or operating in regulated industries, or any company seeking "to take security seriously" are also candidates for its Managed Security Services solutions, Stella says. These solutions include 24/7/365 monitoring and proactive management of roughly 150 different areas, including threat analysis, bandwidth and license management, load balancing, change control, security consulting, and Internet security (firewall, IDP, VPN, anti-malware, anti-spam, and content-filtering protection).

A Global Operation For Serious Security

Globally, the company oversees about 4,500 UTM (unified threat management) devices situated at customers' Internet gateway entry points. Combined, the UTMs grant Network Box "full visibility of the Internet that a customer would never have with his own one or two boxes," Stella says. Attack alerts are reported in real time to Network Box's central Global Monitoring System, which in turn monitors the UTMs to ensure they're Internet-connected and reachable. Customers also have access to various alerts via email, mobile device, and text delivery at times and locations they configure.

"If you want to ensure security on a network, you can't just install a firewall and walk away," Stella says. "That isn't how true security is done; that installation is obsolete and useless within a few minutes. Our service ensures that we are constantly monitoring the Internet for new threats, creating signatures in real time, and almost instantaneously pushing them out to our devices globally."

On average, Network Box's patented PUSH technology pushes 300 daily updates—including antivirus, anti-spam, and IDPS signatures; security patches; and software updates—to customer UTMs within 45 seconds of availability. NOCs (Network Operation Centers) located in more than 12 countries manage the UTMs, while a global network of SOCs (Security Operation Centers) houses security-trained analysts who monitor 24/7/365 in real time the 1,500-plus data networks tied to the UTMs.

Zapping Viruses In Real Time

Another power weapon in Network Box's arsenal is its real-time, cloud-based Z-Scan antivirus technology, which addresses zero-day malware 4,200 times faster than traditional antivirus technologies and helps automate creating and releasing signatures in seconds. Recently, the Tolly Group IT security testing lab found the overall Network Box anti-malware solution (including Z-Scan) to be 100% effective. Z-Scan is also used in Network Box's anti-spam protection, helping create an email gateway with a 99.4% detection rate and nearly no false-positives.

"All this is like having a team of network security experts at your disposal 24/7/365. There is no comparing all this with a simple device installed at the edge of a network and abandoned to itself," says Stella. Doing all of this in-house would cost ten times as much as Network Box, he adds. And the person driving it "would not have full visibility of the Internet, would not be able to get the range of experience and see the range of attacks we see, and would not likely stay very long because the career opportunities would not be sufficient or satisfactory."

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