Megapath enhances unified threat management service

Megapath today announced several enhancements to its unified threat management (UTM) security services, a move that should help further differentiate a product that already has little direct competition, said Megapath Director of Product Management S.L. Sweet in an interview.

Megapath’s UTM offering provides capabilities such as firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware protection, intrusion prevention and web filtering.

“What the service does is remove any virus that meets [a certain] signature prior to impacting the customer’s last mile,” said Sweet.

The new enhancements, scheduled for availability in January, will automatically provide reports to customers detailing noting which viruses were blocked, for example, or providing data about prevented intrusions.

Cloud or premises-based
Megapath offers its UTM service as a circuit-based, gateway-based or CPE-based offering. The CPE-based offering is a managed firewall service, while the circuit and gateway offerings are cloud-based.

Sweet said the circuit-based offering is particularly unique. “MPLS is inherently closed,” explained Sweet. “We open a private network to inject the Internet and use cloud-based security to provide [protection.]”

The offering is available for Megapath dedicated Internet access customers or for customers buying from another carrier with whom Megapath has a network-to-network interface. What makes the service unique, Sweet said, is that not many providers have such an offering on a direct Internet access basis.

“I suspect a lot of them haven’t invested in the underlying automation of the configuration,” he said.

In addition to offering customers a choice of a cloud-based or premises-based solution, Megapath also offers what it calls a “hybrid” solution—although the company uses the term a bit differently than some cloud service providers. Megapath’s hybrid solution has both a cloud-based and a premises-based component, and both components are used to screen traffic.

“If something were to leak through we’d have a secondary layer of protection at the CPE,” said Sweet.

Megapath’s UTM service is underpinned with technology from Fortinet, a software developer focused on security.

UTM is one of several security service offerings available from Megapth, including a cloud-based offering that enables brick-and-mortar retailers to comply with credit card industry security requirements known as PCI DSS (CP: New Megapath cloud-based security service targets retail clients).