WatchGuard Technologies extends real-time network security visibility tool

WatchGuard® Technologies has enhanced its real-time network security visibility solution, WatchGuard Dimension™, to support Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualisation platform, in addition to VMware. WatchGuard has also increased Dimension’s scalability, availability and visibility.

“The global response we’ve seen from customers using Dimension with our XTM family of unified threat management (UTM) platforms has been unprecedented and helped to drive record financial results in Q4 2013,” said Dave Taylor, vice president of corporate and product strategy at WatchGuard Technologies. “In record numbers, customers are using this cloud-based visibility tool to get key insights into security threats and critical trends in their environment. Although this product has been on the market for less than six months, we’re moving quickly to make new enhancements in response to enthusiastic feedback from users.”

UK-based WatchGuard channel partner Rockford IT is seeing growing demand for Dimension. “Our customers want to know what’s going on in their networks in real–time and WatchGuard Dimension provides this visibility and automatically generates executive reports to deliver an immediate snapshot of the top users, threats and compliance issues,” said Tom Sykes, Chairman at Rockford. “This latest addition of Hyper-V and other new features make Dimension an even more valuable tool and what’s more, it’s free for all WatchGuard XTM customers.”

Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Frost & Sullivan, understands the value Dimension brings to the market as well and said, “We did a survey of more than 12,000 information security professionals and 56 percent reported that their organisation has too few information security workers. WatchGuard Dimension is a tool designed to make life easier for security professionals, especially those in the resource constrained mid-market, so they can more quickly distill key information security data into actionable policy creation.”

WatchGuard Dimension is delivered as a free virtual appliance for XTM customers, which simplifies set up. The latest update includes faster access and increased scalability with external and shared database support. It also improves visibility with dynamic hostname resolution, and native language support for key countries will be available toward the end of Q1.