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networkZONE Products for the week of November 29, 2004
Jungo Says…
A Spam Busting Duo: Aladdin and Jungo Add Enterprise-Grade
Content Security Services to Home, SOHO and SMB Gateways
Jungo and Aladdin Knowledge Systems, Ltd. have announced a partnership
that offers a turnkey gateway-level email filtering solution that service
providers can easily offer to home and small business customers. The partnership
combines the Aladdin eSafe proactive content security solution with the
Jungo OpenRG software platform for Home, SOHO and SMB broadband access devices.
Low-cost, Powerful Protection Service for End Users
Home and small business users gain a secure, enterprise-quality email experience
featuring a leading email filter otherwise available only to large organizations.
Through a simple registration process, customers can activate this unmatched
protection at the click of a button, immediately receiving anti-virus and
email filtering protection, as well as automatic updates, with no performance
loss.
Additional Opportunities for Service Providers and CPE Vendors
The Jungo-Aladdin offering provides monthly revenue opportunities for OEMs,
service providers and CPE vendors. This subscription-based service requires
no up-front investment and can be immediately deployed and marketed to the
customer base. For CPE vendors, the solution is integrated within Jungo
OpenRG, requiring only simple upgrades for existing OpenRG-based devices.
"Organizations and individuals are exposed to high risk every time they send or receive an e-mail. Those risks include viruses, worms, spam and non-productive content", said Shimon Gruper, Vice President of Technologies, Aladdin eSafe Business Unit. "We are happy to partner with Jungo and together provide a platform to deliver effective e-mail filtering services for home users and the small business that eliminates the need for IT specialists and costly investment in equipment and software licensing."
The unique solution requires no software installation, does not affect throughput and has minimal memory and CPU requirements. eSafe blocks unsolicited spam, and employs state-of- the-art virus detection schemes that are updated on an hourly basis. Protection measures are also enforced using eSafe's Content Inspection Engine using proactive technologies that provide preemptive protection against new and unknown viruses.
"Jungo is continuing to provide leading edge bundled services that create new revenue opportunities for our customers", said Derry Shribman, Chief Technology Officer, Jungo's Software Technologies. "The Aladdin Jungo solution provides OEMs and ODMs fully integrated service that can be added to existing or to new devices powered by OpenRG with out effecting performance or bill of materials."
About OpenRG OpenRG is a scalable suite of software technologies that
provides customer premise equipment (CPE) vendors with the infrastructure
needed to bring to market Home, SOHO and SMB gateways. OpenRG significantly
simplifies development cycles, improves product performance and accelerates
time-to-market with new revenue generating services. OpenRG includes an
optimized Linux-based operating system, optional VxWorks support, communication
and routing protocols, network security (Stateful Packet Inspection Firewall),
wireless LAN security (802.1x, RADIUS client, WPA) Virtual Private Networking
(VPN), Universal Plug and Play, web-based management, remote upgrade capabilities,
support for CableHome 1.1-based devices and a wide range of home networking
applications.
analogZONE Says . . .
Although I have not reviewed Jungo's software stacks and application packages in these hallowed pages before now, I'm familiar with them from work I did at a previous publication. They originally started life selling protocol stacks, but have climbed up the food chain and are now supplying integrated software solutions for gateways and SOHO products such as routers, modems, gateways, IP phones, wireless APs, media adapters, print servers, and even storage servers. Their flagship product, OpenRG, provides a nicely-structured package of stacks, applications, and functions that work with Linux or VxWorks OSs. While OpenRG has been on the market for quite a while now, their recent inclusion of hooks to enable inclusion of 3rd-party mail filtering services is a novel and interesting update to a solid product that's worthy of note.
OpenRG has proven to be a very versatile and popular platform for building things like broadband gateways, media players and adapters, and set top boxes. A thin "OS abstraction layer" allows the same collection of routing, networking, security, and protocol stacks to run on nearly any physical platform that has sufficient MIPS to support it. Like other products in its class, Jungo offers a very nice content filtering module to handle routine flagging of IP addresses and URLs, but like anything running on an embedded processor, the fine compute power available means there's a limit to how deeply traffic can be inspected. With the clever and ever-changing tactics used by spammers and hackers who spread viruses, anything you can reasonably expect to fit on a piece of consumer gear will only be able to do some basic XXX.
Jungo has found a novel solution by "outsourcing" this task to Aladdin which has been offering its enterprise-grade server-based solutions to corporate customers for some time. Jungo's client software resides on the gateway but has hooks to pass its incoming e-mail through Aladdin's e-Safe filtering gateway runs on an ISP server or some other 3rd-party service provider. This allows a home user or small business to enjoy enterprise-level protection against viruses, other kinds of malicious code, and spam without having to run or maintain the code on their equipment.
In theory, this could enable a good revenue model for providers as an add-in on top of other subscription-based services such as VoIP, Web filtering, office productivity, parental control, web conferencing. It seems to work the way many of us pay our phone companies to support our voice mail instead of having an answering machine that we must maintain ourselves. Such a combination could be a big value-add opportunity for OEMs. USR for example, runs a 3rd-party site that runs as a transparent front-end to an existing ISP. This can be free with the purchase of a product, or run as a subscription service. Pricing varies with service model, but Aladdin says it's typically $3 - $4/month.
My only technical concern with this arrangement is that it gets a little tricky if the filtering service is run on a 3rd-party server that sits between a subscriber and their ISP. Aladdin was very sketchy with technical details about how they do it, but assures me that they have a "man-in-the middle" technique that provides a transparent intercept and pass-through of your mail with little or no impact. Unfortunately, without any more technical information, I can't make any judgment about the merits of such a system and must add a bit over a half-saltshaker to my vapor index rating.
The client-side software needed to link to Aladdin's eSafe service is included with Jungo's OpenRG offerings and add no significant cost to a gateway product.
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