Small businesses are always on the lookout for a good “win-win” scenario to help gain ground in their race and WatchGuard built an express lane to winning with Reputation Enabled Defense (RED). Reputation Enabled Defense allows businesses to simultaneously tighten their security and improve performance speeds without needing to add a supplementary firewall to their network. The best part? It’s already included in both WatchGuard Total Security Suite and Basic Security Suite subscription packages. WatchGuard RED is a cloud-based service that looks up the reputation score of millions of known URLs, extending protection against malicious sites and botnets without sacrificing speed. In fact, Reputation Enabled Defense dramatically increases web processing by automating tasks out of traditional scanning methods.
Read on for four ways WatchGuard RED protects your network while enhancing its performance.
1 – Reduce AntiVirus Processing
WatchGuard’s wide-reaching network of threat intelligence research fuels a cloud-based web reputation service that allows your WatchGuard Firebox to spend less time running constant AntiVirus scans and instead focus on crucial tasks. Traffic to URLs with a bad reputation is immediately blocked, meaning your Firebox can move right along to the next security task rather than wasting resources on okaying sites that are already trusted to be safe. In fact, WatchGuard testing consistently reflects a 50% reduction in the time firewalls spent on AV scan processing when RED was enabled.
2 – Faster Reaction Times
Reputation Enabled Defense integrates seamlessly with WatchGuard Dimension, providing administrators with a single-pane-of-glass management experience. Security statistics are shown at a glance, revealing exactly how many URLs have been scanned, how many malicious sites were detected, and how many individual connections are associated with the network–all of this in real time.
To make reaction time even quicker, organizations also gain instant visibility into infected clients, empowering administrators to act fast to isolate and address any threats. Reputation Enable Defense comes integrated directly with WatchGuard’s Botnet Detection service, ensuring that drive-by downloads and phishing attempts won’t lead to users inadvertently joining botnets.
3 – Bypass Trusted URLs & Block Known Threats
WatchGuard Reputation Enabled Defense monitors all outbound traffic on your network, across all ports. Using the intuitive web user interface, administrators can conveniently enable bypassing of URLs that they know to be safe. Likewise, this same dashboard allows for the blocking of known bad URLs. These two capabilities result in both increased performance and tighter security. With the capacity to enable automatic feedback through WatchGuard’s threat intelligence systems, the service is constantly learning and evolving. That means the sky is the limit for a network’s security potential.
4 – Simplify Management
Many small businesses struggle to afford large in-house teams of IT and network security professionals, so any system that automates security tasks and simplifies management is a must-have for SMBs. With Reputation Enabled Defense, IT administrators use a single interface to manage not just WatchGuard RED, but all of the WatchGuard security services that their network employs.
Because all of these services are based in the cloud, organizations don’t have to worry about complicated deployments, excessive hardware, and clutter.
Start Using Reputation Enabled Defense
As mentioned above, WatchGuard conveniently packages Reputation Enabled Defense in both its Total Security Suite and Basic Security Suite offerings, meaning you get RED and a host of other integrated security services all wrapped up in one package bundled with your new hardware. However, if you’re looking to add Reputation Enabled Defense to your existing infrastructure, RED is also offered as a standalone license that you can add on to any Firebox T15, Firebox T35, Firebox T55, Firebox T70, or M-Series Firebox firewall.
Need a hand setting it up? Just let our team of WatchGuard-certified engineers take care of the configuration for you.