SonicWall Shows Off Anti-Spam Service

Network security and data protection specialist SonicWall is aiming its Comprehensive Anti-Spam Service 2.0 at small and midsize businesses, to help them protect themselves against spam and malicious code.

CASS 2.0 is integrated with the company’s Unified Threat Management Firewalls and can be deployed over existing SonicWall appliances as well. The updated version features one-click deployment, personal configuration and compatibility with existing firewalls.

The CASS features inbound anti-spam, anti-phishing, anti-malware, GRID IP reputation, advanced content management, denial of service prevention, full quarantine and customisable per-user junk summaries.

Integrated Solution

Advanced Reputation Management (ARM) utilises Sender IP Reputation to drop junk email at the connection level – including spam, phishing and attached viruses – before it enters the network. GRID Anti-Virus is automatically activated along with CASS to detect SMTP-based virus emails and reroute them as defined by the administrator (for example, rejected or deleted) at the gateway.

“Spam kills productivity and exposes users to security threats. While top quality anti-spam solutions have addressed the menace, they have traditionally required unwanted hardware costs and needed IT managers to learn multiple solution interfaces,” said Patrick Sweeney, vice president of product management and corporate marketing at SonicWall. “CASS solves both problems. It’s integrated directly into the hardware so there are no new hardware costs or interfaces to learn. And, it is the same top quality award-winning solution deployed by some of the world’s largest enterprises. We believe that by bringing a great enterprise quality solution to the SMB, we are going to help a lot of businesses stay productive and safe, while saving them a lot of money.”

New features of CASS 2.0 include Allow/Block lists, which enables administrators to develop “Allow” and “Block” lists for people, companies, lists and address books on both a global and per-user basis, LDAP integration support for multiple LDAP servers for enhanced user management, a new, faster search engine with improved user interface and Junk Store improvements including junk summary, global and per user configurations, user view and admin control setup, and configurable installed host for junk store.

Rampant Spam

“Spam was rampant in our business. I would come in on a Monday and easily spend half an hour cleaning out my mailbox,” said Myk Lougee, general manager at MCR Technologies.

“With the introduction of CASS 2.0, we drastically cut the amount of spam coming into our business which had a huge impact on user productivity,” said Lougee. “CASS 2.0 is not only easy to implement and straightforward to set up, but it pretty much does everything by itself.”