One of the most difficult things for a small or medium business to do is set up a security scheme that’s effective, affordable and intelligible to the average employee.
Chesterfield, Mo. and Baltimore, Md.-based TechGuard is attempting to address that problem by bringing its enterprise and government-level knowledge to small and medium businesses and small or home offices.
TechGuard’s PoliWall is currently used by government agencies and large enterprises to control network access. The software enables those organizations to allow or block access from entire countries with a click, as well as block single IP addresses and IP ranges.
I spoke with TechGuard CEO Suzanne Magee about their new PoliWall ESE, a suite of security solutions developed specifically for SMBs and SOHOs that turns the government-level security firm into the WD-40 of the cybersecurity industry.
ZDNet: Tell me how TechGuard came to be.
Suzanne Magee: TechGuard founded in Feb. 2000 to address issues of national cyberdefense. We’re 50 percent services and 50 percent revolutionary product development. Our service customer is primarily the government, and within that sector, the Department of Defense.
Our initial funding came from a $1.5 million grant for a heuristic firewall project. But heuristically determining what’s good and bad traffic is still not fully possible.
Our patented HIPPIE (High-speed Internet Protocol Packet Inspection Engine) process filters traffic with virtually no latency, at gigabit speeds. What took a day and a half now takes nanoseconds.
Then we developed a product around it called PoliWall.
ZDNet: Tell me about how PoliWall works and what it offers for SMBs and SOHOs.
SM: Spam filters notoriously use a lot of power. This is a low power-consumption, low-bandwidth solution.
We’re offering a way for them to selectively decide which countries of origin they want to communicate with. It will also help them with botnets and zombies and things that can call home.
For an SMB, compliance and these types of things are being forced down to these businesses. They’re looking for cost-effective ways to comply with regulations — say they’re taking credit cards, if they’re publicly-traded, etc. There are so many regulations that it can become overwhelming for a small company. But the cost of one incident can take a company down.
So we’re taking our PoliWall Q product that was launched commercially in July — an enterprise product that ranges from $6,995 to $9,995 that allows you to prioritize your bandwidth and throttle bandwidth — and tailored the capabilities to the SOHO, SMB and datacenter markets.
For SMBs, they may not need the capability to create 250 different filters and apply that to 250 different resources in their network. So they have eight filters, and they can block out traffic from certain countries to try to block spam.
We don’t need to be open to everything in the world, but SMBs don’t have the security network capability to be putting in IP addresses in a list and manage that daily. This gives them the ability. It’s a paradigm shift from blocking the bad and patching and updating to thinking about what [geographic regions] you need to be open to.
Now you can pull up a graphical map of the world and with a few clicks choose who to block. It’s about who you want to let in, not what bad stuff you want to block.
ZDNet: How does that affect the bottom line?
SM: It’s plug and play, doesn’t require any changes to firewall and has an intuitive GUI with a low training threshold.
There’s a two hour learning curve. You don’t have to go to a week-long boot camp to train, and then retrain someone else when that person leaves. People can operate it more like Windows than DOS. We’re moving into the usability space.
For SMBs, that may be for a system administrator that serves another role in the company.
There’s quite a bit of offshore spam. They don’t cooperate with law enforcement. They’re not prosecutable in some countries. For example, at TechGuard, we have a filter that’s NATO-only, because those are the only countries we work with. I get virtually no spam thank to that filter.
You have very granular access controls. Whoever has the override authority can override a filter and it immediately takes effect. If, all of a sudden there’s an attack that’s being attributed to China, Russia, North Korea — instead of taking your whole network down, you can just click.
It’s very powerful, very rapid-response and very intuitive. The cost of entry and the power of the enterprise product was far more than what SMBs needed. We’re offering lesser throughput, fewer maps — scaled it to the various business categories.
ZDNet: Tell me about what makes PoliWall ESE different from your PoliWall products for bigger organizations.
SM: Our PoliWall ESE product offers tailored egress filtering as well as ingress filtering. You protect against things going out of the network as well. You can select which countries you don’t want information going out to.
It has the capability to really minimize your risk to data leakage to a botnet, as well as zombie systems on your network infecting other systems.
ESE stands for “Enterprise Security for Everyone.” We’re going to add precompiled exception lists. They’ll be really helpful in mitigating data leakage risk. There’s a list of known spammers about 5 million entries long. In PoliWall ESE, you can upload the list, and for example, allow the rest of the United States but block those on the list from your trusted nation, going in and coming out.
Another way to set it up is to make a precompiled exception list and have a filter that would block the entire world and only allow in, as an exception, the precompiled list.
In firewalls, that takes a lot of time. It’s very labor intensive. Our product is interoperable with any firewall product. We’re IPv6 compatible and on the Department of Defense approved product list.
ZDNet: What kind of businesses would need such a product?
SM: Healthcare, financial, perhaps retail with PCI (”Payment Card Industry” data standards, or credit card compliance).
If you’re doing business in China, you can still block it but bring in trusted IPs as exceptions, down to a single one. We’ve done exceptions up to 20 million without virtually any latency.
ZDNet: Is the threat from a remote country really necessary for a small business or home office?
SM: It’s a very much needed kind of capability. We’re just not used to thinking about our assets — not in a protectionist kind of way — but from a business perspective.
Why are you open to Belarus? At one point, the biggest contributor to its economy was people hacking U.S. banks. I learned that in an INFRAGARD presentation.
You don’t need to be open to the whole world unless you choose to be for the right reasons.
The access control is really incredible. We’ve truly had people say, ‘We have no need for anything else.’ ”
TechGuard’s PoliWall ESE is priced at $3,995 for a medium-sized business and $1,995 for a small-sized businesses. You can find more information on the company’s website.
Ciprian Muntean 