Astaro Product Awarded by Leading IT Security Publication; Astaro Security Gateway 425 Receives SC Magazine ''Recommended'' Award.

BURLINGTON, Mass. -- Astaro Corporation, developers of the Astaro Security Gateway line of network security appliances today announced that SC Magazine has honored the Astaro Security Gateway 425 with the SC Magazine "Recommended" Award and an overall rating of 4 stars in the group test category of firewalls.

SC Magazine has been a leading trade publication since 1989 and is read by more than 55,000 IT security professionals. The July issue of SC Magazine featured the Astaro Security Gateway 425 as part of their group test for firewalls. The group test, which evaluated nine firewall vendors and focused primarily on core packet filtering and network security, also took into consideration integration and reporting functionality along with overall features, ease-of-use, performance, documentation, support and value to determine the winners. This most recent recognition comes as part of a long string of industry awards for Astaro.

The review hit news stands on July 2nd and focused special attention on the Astaro Security Gateway 425's "good feature set" and multiple device management ability as well as the industry's leading resource documentation.

On the higher end of the Astaro Security Gateway line of appliances, The Astaro Security Gateway 425 offers support for up to 1000 users. Each Astaro Security Gateway, including the 425 provides users protection against a wide range of threats including malware, viruses, hacking, spam, spyware, and phishing. The 425 can also prevent inappropriate, or unproductive content from entering the workplace, and acts as a VPN gateway as well.

"Since the company's founding in 2000, Astaro has received numerous industry awards for our low-cost all-in-one security platform," said co-founder and CEO Jan Hichert. "Success breeds success, but it is our customers who are profiting most from the peace of mind that Astaro affords them."

Highlights from the Astaro Security Gateway 425 review follow below:

"Documentation is very good, with a well-written explanation of deployment scenarios, likely uses and other useful pointers, rather than the walkthrough of the interface most vendors provide."

"The unit's services all worked flawlessly."

"Failover is easy to configure and we liked the ability to password-protect configuration backups."

"IDP (Snort) is included, and new rules can be added easily. Rate limiting and portscan detection all worked well."

"This is a nicely integrated box with all the features we expected, plus some surprises, like support for UPS notification via USB."

"This is a good firewall package."

"Connecting to the internal port, the web GUI got us up and running without any hitches."

The Astaro Security Gateway 425 starts from $9,995 and features an Intel Pentium 4 3.4 GHz processor, 2 Gig DDRII SDRAM, a high-performance 74GB Serial-ATA disk drive for processing, caching, quarantining and logging large amounts of data and files, and eight gigabit ports, including four gigabit ports connected to a PCI-Express bus for near-line speed throughput. A hardware acceleration card has been added with Sensory Networks NodalCore technology.

Astaro most recently announced free availability of its Astaro Command Center(TM), an application for the centralized administration of Astaro's family of unified threat management appliances. With this new application, network security administrators can now easily manage and control all their Astaro Security Gateway appliance installations worldwide. The Command Center can be downloaded via: ftp://ftp2.astaro.de or http://download2.astaro.com.

About Astaro Corp.

Astaro Security Gateways (www.astaro.com) control access to networks, guarantee availability and ensure compliance for businesses and enterprises worldwide, while reducing network administration costs. With Astaro Security Gateway, network administrators and designers achieve Network Assurance: functional, high-performance and safe business networks. Astaro Security Gateways have won numerous industry awards, and are protecting over 30,000 networks in 60 countries, including such companies as Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Los Alamos National Labs, Stanford University and Watsco, Inc. Based in Burlington, MA and Karlsruhe, Germany, the company's products are distributed by a worldwide network of solutions partners who offer local support and services.