EdgeWave iPrism Features & Benefits

Overview:

As a self-contained appliance-based solution, iPrism offers universal interoperability on any platform and in any network environment, delivering Internet security at the gateway, to help enforce your Internet acceptable use and security policies. iPrism seamlessly integrates with your directory services to automate authentication for fast and easy deployment across your organization:

Multi-Layered Security Threat Protection
iPrism's unique combination of enforcement methods assures powerful protection from botnets, malware, viruses, phishing and other threats. These methods include integration with ThreatSTOP's outbound anti-botnet technology, the 100% human-review iGuard URL database, integrated AV engine, and iPrism's unique Circumvention Defense Network. Together they deliver unrivalled protection to your organization and are easily enabled via simple check boxes, rather than complex multi-dimensional rule sets.

Proprietary Technology
iPrism technology is port-agnostic providing comprehensive coverage across your network. Its exclusive transparent bridge deployment won't introduce latency to your network traffic no matter how busy your network gets. With filtered traffic throughput speeds over 500 Mbps, even networks with the largest pipelines are easily managed by iPrism's combination of in-line deployment and kernel-level filtering technology.

Hybrid Remote Filtering Requiring no VPN or Hardware in the DMZ
With iPrism's exclusive hybrid technology, you can manage remote users easily with no VPN tunnels, no DMZ proxy deployments and no browser-specific PAC files required, assuring bandwidth conservation and no latency. iPrism's hybrid technology uses a location-aware remote filtering client and the Amazon Web Services distributed data center to ensure enforcement of your AUP across all users, on or off-premises.

Most Comprehensive and Accurate URL Database
EdgeWave maintains its own URL database, with 80 categories containing millions of websites. This allows you to easily customize your filtering to fit the exact requirements of your acceptable use policy. iPrism assures automatic, daily database updates, and crucial security categories, including anti-botnet and anti-circumvention defense, are updated hourly.

Features

Exclusive Transparent Bridge Mode Deployment
iPrism's standard deployment and proprietary port-agnostic, kernel-level filtering combine the accuracy and security of pass-through filters with the speed and coverage of a pass-by or sniffer-type solutions, giving you the best of both worlds. Unlike proxy-based user-level filtering solutions, our kernel-level filtering means latency is never introduced. However, the iPrism appliance can still function as a direct proxy when deployed in Transparent Bridge Mode, working seamlessly in a wide range of network scenarios involving mixed platforms, legacy systems and other variants. iPrism h-Series appliances include a built-in, high-speed network failover circuit to mitigate introducing a single point of failure, and load balancing is supported.

iGuard Database with iPrism Automated Rating Protocol (iARP)
The iPrism 100% human-reviewed iGuard database includes the iARP feature, which further refines Web filtering by sending your most frequently-accessed unrated URLs to the iGuard team automatically to be added to your and all our customers' database.

Exclusive iPrism Hybrid Remote Filtering
iPrism's new Remote Filtering extends comprehensive, flexible Web security to your corporate laptop and other remote or roaming users with an exclusive hybrid technology that makes deployment simple and seamless. Unlike any other remote filtering solution on the market, iPrism's proprietary technology delivers powerful Web security to your remote users without using your VPN and without adding any hardware in your DMZ or requiring browser-specific PAC files. Using a combination of iPrism Remote Filtering Client (for both Windows and Mac) and proven Amazon WS Data Center cloud service, iPrism Remote Filtering delivers comprehensive Internet security to your employees no matter where they are located. iPrism Remote Filtering's centralized administration and reporting assures AUP and security policy enforcement as well as comprehensive reporting across your organization.

Outbound Anti-Botnet and Inbound Antivirus Protection
iPrism Web Security provides continuous defense against dangerous botnets by leveraging the ThreatSTOP Botnet Threat List to stop the "phone-home" mechanism that enables stealth, bot-related malware to steal identities or data and commit illegal or malicious actions within and outside your network. When combined with our four-factored antivirus engine that blocks malicious inbound traffic, you get multi-layered protection from damaging botnets, viruses and malware to protect your organization without incurring false positives or latency.

Centralized, Multi-User Admin and Reporting with Granular Override Management and SSO
iPrism gives you the flexibility to define roles for policies, reports, and other facets of administration with eight pre-defined and customizable roles that you can delegate to any person within the organization (local or authenticated users). And unlike any other solution, iPrism has a granular override feature that allows you to delegate override privileges to a secondary administrator or even provide self-override roles to some end-users. iPrism's browser-based user interface offers single sign-on (SSO) access for comprehensive administration and reporting capabilities via any browser. In addition, multiple delegated administrators can log into the UI simultaneously for increased efficiency. This is ideal for situations requiring more flexible policy enforcement, or for large organizations trying to optimize resources.

Application Controls
iPrism offers application controls that reduce the risks associated with unsanctioned application communications. These applications, which include popular IM and P2P protocols, not only erode productivity and drain bandwidth; they can open serious security gaps where bot-related malware and viruses can invade your network. iPrism allows you to monitor and block IM and P2P applications such as Skype and FTP with a simple set-and-forget check box.

Enhanced Directory Integration
Unlike some competitors, iPrism employs on-box user authentication rather than user identification giving you significant advantages. Because iPrism complies with Microsoft Best Practices and does not require a separate off-box agent, you achieve automated authentication with more security, less bandwidth drain and no latency. iPrism authentication incurs no OS conflicts and eases your administration duties by integrating seamlessly with all major network directories including Novell Netware Directory Services (NDS), Windows Active Directory (including one-way outgoing trust support) for Window 7 and also Mac clients using AD 2003/2008 and Mac OSX Snow Leopard. In addition, as an LDAP variant, it is possible to integrate iPrism Web Filter with OSX Server Open Directory (LDAP v2/v3).

iPrism iLearn Center Embedded Video Tutorials
The iPrism iLearn Center offers exclusive video tutorials that are embedded in the new iPrism user interface. This enhanced user support feature allows you to manage your Web filter configuration and policy settings on-the-fly, shaving hours off the time you spend on IT administration tasks. The iLearn Center houses a series of short video tutorials that walk you through specific iPrism tasks without requiring you to log out and access a manual or knowledgebase. These concise, easy-to-use materials include text as well as videos covering a wide range of iPrism capabilities. The iLearn Center tutorials are conveniently accessible through the new iPrism Web-enabled user interface from a central help page and also via icons located at relevant points throughout the iPrism UI.

Seamless Terminal Server Integration
iPrism's unique auto-login feature allows terminal server users to maintain their productivity without incessant authentication requests. iPrism's unique "session based" authentication technology lets you use Auto-login to simplify the authentication process without installing any software on your terminal or AD servers. This seamless integration is verified by the fact that iPrism is the only Citrix Ready appliance-based Web Filter on the market, assuring consistent policy application whether your users are Web surfing from their desktops or via Citrix or other terminal server systems.

Comprehensive Logging, Real-Time Monitoring and Reporting On-Box
iPrism's comprehensive on-box reporting requires no additional hardware or software and includes real-time monitoring and email alerts that give you highly accurate and timely visibility on Internet activity across your organization. Historical reports can be generated using a variety of available templates or you can customize reports to suit your needs. Reports can be scheduled by day week or month and can run in the background freeing you to take care of other projects while your reports are automatically generated. You can also assign designated users the right to run the Reports Manager, allowing you to use your IT resources more efficiently. Email alerts are generated when security problems are detected allowing you to quickly mitigate threats before they cause damage.

If you have multiple iPrisms deployed across your large enterprise and distributed network, the iPrism Enterprise Reporting Server (ERS) delivers comprehensive aggregate reports on all Web activity quickly and easily.

Anti-Circumvention and Anonymous Browsing Protection
Employees who try to get around your Web security measures by using circumvention tools, proxies or anonymizer websites, will have their attempts blocked at every turn by iPrism's multi-layered approach:

Circumvention Defense Network (CDN)
iPrism's unique CDN protects your organization from circumvention attempts by gathering intelligence on thousands of externally-hosted non-Web servers used to circumvent your network security by re-routing Web requests. We collect these IP addresses in the cloud and analyze them against known legitimate sites to mitigate false positives and immediately and continuously download the results to your iPrism. iPrism inspects outbound traffic and enforces monitoring and blocking of circumvention tools -- including UltraSurf, Tor and JAP clients - attempting to connect to their server networks.

Dynamically-Detected Proxies
Using deep packet inspection with real-time pattern rules, iPrism monitors and blocks websites or private servers leveraging script-based proxy tools, including PHProxy and CGIProxy, to anonymously redirect web requests.

Anonymizers
The iGuard analyst team continuously monitors message groups and other anonymizer listing sites for new anonymizer URLs, and updates the database hourly.

Active Domain IP Address Mapping and SSL Certificate Inspection
Administrators always know where users are going on the Web because HTTPS traffic is enforced and reported using domain names, instead of IP addresses, in both transparent bridge and proxy mode deployments. This mapping feature blocks the ability to circumvent iPrism using IP addresses.

EdgeWave h-Series Appliances
iPrism's powerful line of high-performance hardware offers a full range of appliances designed to deliver optimum performance and blazing Web security throughput speeds to organizations of all sizes no matter how big your pipeline. All of the h-Series models share a hardened and optimized OS for complete interoperability. Also, many h-Series models offer dual hot-swappable hard drives and power supplies for enhanced reliability.

Flexible Administration:

In accordance with our goal to keep daily administrative requirements to a minimum, our Web security solution gives IT professionals unrivalled flexibility in managing their resources with the Admin Roles feature. Using the browser-based central management console, IT Managers can easily share administrative tasks by assigning a wide range of roles and privileges to others in their department or the company. Choose from eight pre-defined, customizable roles or create new roles to suit your specific requirements. You can also restrict privileges to managing or reporting on specific users or networks and accountability is assured by using administrator logs to audit system configuration changes in real-time.

Benefits of iPrism's Multiple Administration Roles:

• Allows you to more efficiently manage your IT department and resources by delegating administrative tasks
• Enhances our already low TCO by providing superior flexibility in distributing and managing roles and tasks
• Assures that you maintain the security level of your department when you assign roles by authenticating per directory service group membership or via locally defined credentials

iPrism's Exclusive Override Delegation Feature
iPrism Web Security offers a highly granular override management feature that no one else in the industry offers. It allows administrators to address end-users' override requests by delegating override privileges to a secondary administrator or even providing self-override roles to some end-users. This should be welcome relief to IT administrators who must deal with repetitive requests from multiple users going to the same blocked page or individual users going to multiple blocked pages.

The benefits of override granularity and enhancement include:

• Streamlines the time-consuming task of fulfilling override requests
• Allows you to delegate override privileges to others in your organization, even non-IT personnel
• New enhancements offer more override duration options and enable overrides that allow time-limited access per a different user's profile.

This flexibility is extremely beneficial in environments where you may want to grant privileges for special projects or times such as:

• Teachers who may want to apply their profile categories to students as they work on a particular assignment.
• Business departments that require temporary access to content that might be blocked normally.
• HR or Legal departments engaged in special projects.
• However you choose to delegate roles, you maintain override control with the ability to lock website categories from being overridden, monitor and revoke active overrides in real-time or report on overridden access

iLearn Videos for Instant Assistance
iPrism includes a series of integrated, on-demand instructional videos designed to help administrators navigate basic Web Filtering features. We know IT Administrators are busy and don't always have time to consult a manual or knowledgebase to complete simple Web filtering tasks. Whether you are new to iPrism Web Security, or just need a quick refresh on a configuration task, the short 3-5 minute iLearn Center video tutorials are designed to quickly walk you through completing common functions, step-by-step without searching through a database or downloading additional materials.

Transparent Authentication:

iPrism makes authentication easy with transparent methodology that allows you to delegate administration roles via group membership to privileges mapping, and have visibility into, manage and enforce user policies via group membership to profiles mapping.

Active Directory & "Auto-Login"

iPrism Web Security supports Microsoft Active Directory (AD) services running on Windows Server 2000, 2003 or 2008. Unlike transparent agent-based user identification methods, Windows or Mac users' identity is not only transparently obtained, but authenticated in real-time, using a secure Microsoft protocol when they are logged into a domain or other realm trusted by iPrism Web Security's configured AD domain controller. iPrism supports redundant domain controllers, one-way outgoing domain trust and hierarchal nested groups.

iPrism's Auto-Login feature uses Kerberos as the primary authentication protocol with NTLMv2 as a backup, which enables the client browsers to respond to authentication requests with no intervention by the user. Many competitors only use NTLMv2, or even NTLMv1 in some deployments, as their primary protocol, which is not recommended by Microsoft.

On-box Kerberos Authentication:

• Is recommended by Microsoft
• Uses a "trusted 3rd-party" schema, which is the already trusted domain controller (DC), so it complies with Microsoft best security practices without domain controller changes
• Is the least noisy protocol because iPrism doesn't need to challenge the client and pass this information to the DC every time, and does not use insecure NetBios requests
• Is independent of operating systems maintenance or upgradeability concerns, including specific versions or patches, because it doesn't require a separate server to host agents, or client agents on every managed workstation

Mac OSX Client Auto-Login
Mac OSX 10.4/10.5/10.6 clients can also take advantage of iPrism's Auto-Login feature. With Active Directory services running on Windows Server 2003 or 2008, you can achieve authentication by binding the clients to the same domain controller as the iPrism Web Security solution using the Directory Utility. If you do not wish to bind, you can take advantage of Safari browsers' locally cached credentials after a one-time prompt to the user.

Session-Based Authentication & Proxy Mode
Unique "session-based" authentication method enables auto-login for multi-user workstation environments such as Citrix or Microsoft Terminal Services. Users are allowed to maintain their productivity without incessant authentication requests, while administrators do not need to install agent software on servers, ensuring that uniform user-based policy enforcement is being enabled across your organization.

Novell eDirectory Support

iPrism Web Security supports Auto-Login feature when using Novell eDirectory as the LDAP server and Novell login clients on user machines.

LDAP Support, Captive Portal & Local Users

iPrism Web Security supports manual login feature via captive portal or basic authentication when using a LDAP v1/2/3 compliant directory service, including Mac OSX Server Open Directory or OpenLDAP, or Local Users.

In some multi-user workstation environments, it may be preferable to explicitly request users' credentials by presenting a customizable authentication page via a captive portal. Optionally, this page can be sent over secure SSL-encrypted traffic.

For guests or delegated administrators who do not have user accounts defined in an existing domain group, iPrism Web Security allows you to locally-define a local user's credentials.

iLearn Center:

iPrism Web Security already saves IT Administrators over 500 hours over other leading Web security solutions, and now with the exclusive iLearn Center we've found a way to save you even more time on Web Filtering tasks. The iLearn Center consists of a series of on-demand instructional videos designed to help adminstrators navigate basic Web Filtering features. We know IT Administrators are busy and don't always have time to consult a manual or knowledgebase to complete simple Web filtering tasks. Whether you are new to iPrism Web Security, or just need a quick refresh on a configuration task, the short 3-5 minute iLearn Center video tutorials are designed to quickly walk you through completing common functions, step-by-step without searching through a database or downloading additional materials.

Fully integrated

iLearn video tutorials, with useful help text, link directly from the relevant product pages and launch automatically to quickly demonstrate the feature you wish to learn about. This enhanced user support tool allows IT Administrators to manage configuration and policy settings on-the-fly, without having to log out of the interface.

Learn from the experts

iLearn Center instructional videos were created by our product experts and demonstrate the best practices for both basic and custom configuration of your iPrism Web Filtering appliance. Useful tips and tricks included in the videos, along with recommendations for related content, help you get up and running quickly with iPrism Web Security.

Save time

Basic Web filtering tasks shouldn't be time-consuming. iPrism Web Security with iLearn simplifies Web filtering management and saves you time. We started with the most-frequently used iPrism features and incorporated feedback from our customers to design task-oriented tutorials that quickly demonstrate the steps necessary to complete a specific function, without adding extraneous content

TCO Advantage:

 

iPrism Users spend 50% less time on Web Filtering compared to Websense and SurfControl

A new study by independent research consultants Robert Hale and Associates found that iPrism Web Filter users spend one-half the time spent by Websense and SurfControl users on their Web filtering tasks. The study results have strong implications for organizations looking to reduce total cost of ownership while maintaining robust network security.

A summary of study findings includes:

• For all companies and all parameters surveyed, Websense and SurfControl customers spent twice as much time in the first year as EdgeWave iPrism users. EdgeWave iPrism users spent an average of 483 hours per year, Websense users spent 1,040 hours and SurfControl users spent 910 hours.
• The dramatic difference in hours spent was across all tasks associated with a Web filter that were measured including set up and installation, management and administration, hardware maintenance and reporting.
• The study found that EdgeWave iPrism users need to re-boot less often then Websense and SurfControl users
• A larger number of Websense and SurfControl customers have switched to iPrism than have iPrism customers switched to either Websense or SurfControl

Why is TCO Important?

When calculating the total cost of ownership (TCO) of any hardware or software product, the acquisition price is just part of the equation. According to a recent Gartner report, TCO can be up to 4.5 times higher than your initial acquisition price. Gartner states that the main variable driving up TCO is labor costs. The good news is that labor costs are actually the most manageable part of the equation. This TCO study shows you how dramatically iPrism cuts the time your IT staff will spend on all tasks associated with web filtering compared to Websense and SurfControl. The difference directly affects your bottom line.

iPrism Cuts TCO Dramatically Across all Tasks

What About TCA?

The study, the first of its kind in North America, measured the costs involved in acquiring a Web filtering solution, analyzing those that extend beyond the initial solution price. These costs can include additional hardware and software required to operate the solution, time spent on integration and others factors. The study found that iPrism TCA is up to 43% lower than the comparable Websense solution for an average 750 seat network.