Esafe – Real-Time Intelligent Content Security Solutions
Esafe is a real time intelligent web and mail scanning solution. But what exactly is that? A real time intelligent web and mail scanning solution is a software package that sits on or near the perimeter of your network and monitors all of the traffic that comes or goes from it. Thanks to new advanced with the internet, you can now do more and more from a vast array of devices, things like PDAs, cellular phones, and even iPods are all internet accessible now days.
How a real time intelligent web and mail scanning solution helps this security nightmare is that it looks for threats to these devices as well as your typical laptop and desktop computer systems and reports what it finds. If it does find a threat, it notifies the system administrator. The advantage of sitting on the perimeter of the network is that it can offer a more robust protection mechanism.
The software can be more proactive in its steps to counter malware, spyware, and spam. That’s not all this suite does though. If you’re an attentive administrator, you understand that your users depend on you for all things computer guidance and your boss depends on you for fixing the budget, well with application and URL filtering, you can help your coworkers avoid wasting time!
Let’s talk for a moment about the protection measures, the malware protection, the spyware protection, and the antispam features are all very nice. By scanning all traffic in and out of the network, eSafe can use an intelligent content security mechanism to simultaneously scan traffic for viruses and patterns matching known malware and spyware. This multiple layer approach ensures that the vast majority of traffic entering your network is legitimate and not set on wasting time or resources.
The suite also features two anti spam engines, delivering deep content security analysis and filtering out unwanted programs like spyware, trojans, viruses and worms. The content filtering engines cover gateway level (TCP/IP) malware attacks, file sharing programs such as Kazaa, iMesh, Gnutella, Napster, eDonkey and bittorrent are filtered out (dropped), instant messaging is also dropped. The program can additionally be configured to filter out unauthorized web traffic (such as www.youtube.com).
Esafe’s software seemed to be easy to use. I used it very briefly and for a web proxy/gateway tool, it’s not bad. The program outputs reports in a number of ways, you can view charts, graphs, and other representations of network traffic. You can also configure all of the server’s function over the network via a web interface. The interface isn’t too bad, though I didn’t get a chance to play around on it because for some reason, companies don’t want you messing with their content filtering or firewalls. Weird. Regardless, the Web Security Gateway is not cheap nor free, I don’t know of any free trials either. It was created to do one thing and that’s to protect the network from all outside attacks and monitor the interior of the network for emerging threats from within, in this it does it very well.
