SAN JOSE, Calif., Dec. 10, 2002 -- Secure Computing Corp. Tuesday announced that Philadelphia Suburban Corp. has deployed Secure's Sidewinder®, SafeNet SoftRemote, SafeWord® PremierAccess™ and SmartFilter® solutions to provide security inbound to their network and ensure appropriate outbound access to the Internet.
Philadelphia Suburban provides water and wastewater services to approximately two million residents in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, New Jersey, Maine, and North Carolina.
Since 1997, Philadelphia Suburban has been using Sidewinder to provide Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) between 5 sites and to protect their corporate network. They also have an additional Sidewinder for Disaster Recovery at their hot site.
By rerouting traffic to this firewall, they are able to keep their network up and running without interruption. Since deploying Sidewinder, they have added PremierAccess to strongly authenticate SoftRemote VPN users accessing their internal network. And most recently, they have added SmartFilter for URL filtering to ensure productive use of the Internet.
SmartFilter's On-Box™ technology allows Philadelphia Suburban to run the filtering solution directly on Sidewinder, saving them the cost of purchasing additional hardware.
"Our relationship started with Secure Computing when we were evaluating firewalls. We selected Sidewinder over the two other firewalls under consideration because of its high security architecture and graphical user interface [GUI], which makes it very easy to manage our perimeter security policy," said William Greene, Systems Manager at Consumers Water, a subsidiary of Philadelphia Suburban Corporation. "As we have had new requirements for access control solutions, we have stayed with Secure Computing not only because of our outstanding relationship and their superb customer support, but because of their product superiority. Secure's complete line of access control solutions integrated seamlessly into our existing network."
Sidewinder, a firewall and VPN gateway, provides Philadelphia Suburban with an impenetrable multi-layered network shield without sacrificing performance or ease of use. Sidewinder's hybrid architecture encompasses the entire range of firewall mechanisms including stateful inspection, circuit proxies, application filters, secured servers, and real-time alerts in one simple, cost-effective package.
Secure's SoftRemote VPN client provides an encrypted connection between their remote users and their Sidewinder VPNs.
While SoftRemote delivers privacy with VPN encrypted tunnels, Philadelphia Suburban understands that only strong authentication can ensure the positive identification for their VPN users. The company chose Secure Computing's PremierAccess to add strong authentication to the SoftRemote VPN connections. SafeWord hardware and software tokens eliminate the well-known vulnerabilities of memorized passwords by generating one-time use passwords, which make sniffing, dictionary attacks, and other common password hacks useless. PremierAccess also adds security to a wide range of other network applications, including Web, Citrix, and wireless LANs.
SmartFilter enables Philadelphia Suburban to build and enforce their Web-usage policy. SmartFilter's international Control List, updated continuously, accurately categorizes millions of Web sites into content groups, including sex, gambling, and MP3. Extremely easy to use, the SmartFilter software comes pre-installed on Sidewinder, can be activated in minutes and requires no additional hardware. SmartFilter's comprehensive reports enable Philadelphia Suburban's management to monitor Web-surfing activity.
"Organizations like Philadelphia Suburban rely on the Internet to cost-effectively establish reliable communication lines between their various sites and remote users," said Vince Schiavo, senior vice president of worldwide sales at Secure Computing. "We are committed to providing our customers with industry-leading access control solutions to secure those communication lines, protect their corporate information resources and ensure productive use of the Internet."
About Secure Computing
Secure Computing Corp. is a provider of enterprise network access control solutions. Visit the Secure Computing Web site at www.securecomputing.com.
