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Palo Alto Networks™, the leader in next-generation firewalls, today announced that its next-generation firewalls protect enterprise networks from saturation by video streams of the popular 2009 March Madness NCAA basketball tournaments currently underway – even when users employ URL filtering evasion techniques.
Today, and throughout the tournament, enterprise workers will enjoy live streaming feeds of the games and highlights at work, negatively impacting the performance of their employers' networks. In addition, this year there is a High Quality option for live streaming video of every game, which consumes even more bandwidth, up to 2+Mbps per user at highest quality.
To address this, many organizations are again implementing URL filtering policies to limit or block traffic to college basketball streaming sites, which this year use Microsoft’s Silverlight to stream footage. Users, however, have found numerous, easy-to-use ways to circumvent traditional enterprise controls, rendering URL filtering alone ineffective.
Applications leveraged by users include public proxies, such as Hopster and Kproxy, private proxies, such as a CGI proxy set up on a home broadband connection, tunneling applications, such as UltraSurf or TOR, and Slingbox. While enterprises cannot control these applications with traditional security infrastructure, the innovative App-ID technology in Palo Alto Networks’ next-generation firewalls sees and controls these applications and techniques for getting around URL filtering – including proxies, circumvention applications, and Slingbox – and controlling Silverlight itself. Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls also provide URL filtering, integrated into the same application- and user-based policies.
"Every year, basketball fans get more savvy and leverage applications that bypass their enterprises’ controls," said Steve Mullaney, vice president of marketing for Palo Alto Networks. "This time of year reminds enterprises that simple URL filtering is not enough to fully protect their networks. Enterprises need a solution which understands the applications and gives them the visibility and control over what is being accessed by their network, such as what Palo Alto Networks delivers."
About Palo Alto Networks
Palo Alto Networks™ (paloaltonetworks.com) is the leader in next-generation firewalls, enabling unprecedented visibility and granular policy control of applications and content – by user, not just IP address – at up to 10Gbps with no performance degradation. Based on patent-pending App-ID™ technology, Palo Alto Networks firewalls accurately identify and control applications – regardless of port, protocol, evasive tactic or SSL encryption – and scan content to stop threats and prevent data leakage. Enterprises can for the first time embrace Web 2.0 and maintain complete visibility and control, while significantly reducing total cost of ownership through device consolidation.
Palo Alto Networks, the Palo Alto Networks Logo and App-ID are trademarks of Palo Alto Networks, Inc. in the United States. All other trademarks, trade names or service marks used or mentioned herein belong to their respective owners.
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