Caymas Systems Announces the First Identity-Driven Access Gateways.

PETALUMA, Calif. -- First Solution to Allow Extended Enterprises to Fully Control All Access to Their Information Assets Via Patent-Pending Identity Tagging Architecture

Caymas Systems today unveiled the first Identity-Driven Access Gateways. With the Caymas 220, 318, and 525 enterprises can, for the first time, enable, control, secure, and audit internal and external access to enterprise data and applications by using the unique identity of users, devices, and resources. At a time when enterprises face a business imperative to share their corporate data and applications with customers, business partners, contractors, and internal and remote employees, Caymas provides unprecedented control and high performance access at a radically economical price.

The Caymas Gateways are the only solutions to provide comprehensive universal access: both internal and external to the corporation, enforce differentiated access policies, integrate end-to-end application level security from the desktop to the application, and provide fine-grained auditing and logging of all activity for regulatory and legal compliance. Caymas Access Gateways are deployed for remote and mobile user access, business partner extranet access, and internal LAN access control.

Caymas' Access Gateways are based on the company's patent-pending Identity Tagging and Control Architecture, which includes Caymas' high performance custom silicon and ultra secure, custom software operating system, CaymOS. This unique intellectual property delivers radically economical pricing, extensive scalability for both internal and external access applications, and the highest levels of security for perimeter, LAN, data center, and DMZs. The Gateways seamlessly integrate with the existing enterprise Identity infrastructure.

"Hormel has customers, partners and employees all over the world," said Andy Munger, Network Systems Programmer, Hormel Foods. "The Caymas Gateway helps us meet multiple access requirements with identity-specific policy creation, enforcement, and auditing. The range of access methods and applications it supports allows us to both improve the efficiency of our staff and the security of our information assets."

Enterprises must share their corporate data and applications with a large and diverse number of users both inside and outside the extended enterprise. As the network is opened and information assets are shared, it becomes increasingly difficult to protect these assets from viruses, hackers and misuse, and to effectively track how information is being used for regulatory and legal compliance, marketing and financial purposes. To allow a variety of access scenarios, IT administrators are forced to piece together access control solutions consisting of application level and departmental firewalls, VPN devices, IDS systems, DMZ data replication, web access and identity management, and homegrown application retooling. These solutions are fragmented, expensive, lack the context of user and device identity, and leave extensive security and management holes. They are also difficult to integrate with the other elements of the enterprise infrastructure, which affects performance and results in project delays, excessive cost, and ongoing maintenance expenses.

"Before we spent a minute on product development, we traveled worldwide and spoke to over 300 CIOs about the challenges they were facing as they tried to open up their information resources to people inside and outside their companies," said Terence Brown, president and CEO of Caymas Systems. "After hearing about the pain of juggling a hodge-podge of access infrastructure solutions, security breaches and runaway expenses, we were committed to delivering ultra secure, radically economical, truly universal access. Our Gateways were designed to provide immediate pain relief."

Caymas Identity-Driven Access Gateways obviate the need for fragmented and expensive approaches to remote user access, partner extranets, and internal LAN access control. Tightly coupled with the existing enterprise Identity infrastructure, these purpose-built Gateways deliver key advantages that are demanded by extended enterprises including:

--Universal Access: Caymas Gateways are the only products that give enterprises the ability to tightly couple internal and external access and control at both the network and application level. The same granular controls are applied to users whether they are accessing resources remotely over HTTP, tunneling applications over SSL, over network-level connectivity remotely, or over the local LAN. Administrators can create policy once, and it is imprinted and applied to access rules over intranets, extranets and remote access resources. Caymas delivers the most extensive access mechanisms available including reverse and transparent proxies, SSL and IPSec clients, Java and ActiveX tunnels, and dynamic port control.

--Identity-Based Access Control: Caymas Gateways are the only solutions that deliver network through application layer control, all tied to the identity of the user, device, and resource. The powerful Policy Processing Engine provides business-driven differentiated access. Caymas' identity-driven approach allows enterprises to control access to applications and data, and provides the most comprehensive view of how users, networks and data interact. Fine grained auditing and logging of all activity ensures regulatory and legal compliance.

--Integrated Application Security: Caymas Gateways are the only access products that block the most dangerous application layer attacks by performing deep packet inspection of all traffic, and specifically for authorized users and across encrypted sessions. Powerful signature and behavioral-based intrusion prevention is integrated and tied to identity. Endpoint workstations are checked for vulnerabilities before allowing access, ensuring a rogue application or virus doesn't exist on a client machine before entering the network. And Caymas controls network admission to allow or prohibit network level access at the Gateway.

--Federated Policy Enforcement: Caymas Gateways were designed for today's internal and external access needs as well as for distributed environments within and between enterprises. The Gateways can extend and protect access at a single site, single domain, or across domains. Caymas automatically distributes and enforces access policies, and provides distributed authentication, collaboration and control across the enterprise.

--Radical Price and Performance: Caymas Gateways were purpose-built to meet the security and performance needs of the extended enterprise. The platform consists of a patent-pending custom silicon and embedded OS architecture that can be easily scaled from tens to thousands of users, applications and policies. The easy to deploy Gateways eliminate expensive software, general-purpose OS appliances, custom development, and integration costs. Caymas Gateways are flat priced, so there are no additional per user or per feature fees.

"Caymas' focus on enabling secure universal application access for both internal and external users fills the gap between remote-access focused SSL VPN solutions and expensive access control software," said Jeff Wilson, Principal Analyst, Infonetics. "This is truly a unique offering that's destined to appeal to beleaguered IT organizations attempting to provide open but secure application access to ALL of their users."

Identity-Driven Access Gateway Specifications

The Caymas 220 is designed for small to medium sized enterprises and remote offices and supports up to 100 concurrent users and 100 Mbps of encrypted traffic. The Caymas 318 is designed for medium to large enterprises and supports up to 500 concurrent users and 300 Mpbs of encrypted traffic. The enterprise class Caymas 525 supports up to 2,500 concurrent users and 1 Gbps of encrypted traffic. Caymas Access Gateways may be clustered together for even larger deployments. These 1RU and 2RU Gateways take just minutes to install and are easily managed through the SNMP V.3 based, customizable Caymas Management System.

World Class Customers and Partners

Caymas has amassed customers across all key vertical segments including financial services, healthcare, government, education, manufacturing, retail, transportation, legal, and information technology. Customers include Hormel Foods, Manulife, The Universite de Montreal, and Mt. Sinai Hospital. The company is partnering with infrastructure, security and networking partners including Symantec, Citrix, RSA Security, Sygate, SafeNet, Zone Labs, WholeSecurity and Netegrity.

Pricing and Availability

The Caymas 318 and 525 are available today directly from Caymas or through a network of value added resellers. The Caymas 220 is targeted for availability in December 2004. Identity-Driven Access Gateway prices start at $9,995 U.S. List. Caymas pricing is all-inclusive -- there are no additional costs for features or for adding additional users

(Editor's Note: see release entitled Former Cisco, Hp And ISS Executives Launch First Identity-Driven Access Gateway Company, released 10/11/04).

About Caymas Systems

Caymas Systems allows organizations to control access and control their business with the world's first Identity-Driven Access Gateways. Caymas solutions allow enterprises, government agencies, and institutions to securely extend their information assets to remote employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Caymas solutions integrate third generation remote access, ultra secure extranets and wire speed internal access control, allowing businesses to identify, authorize, protect and audit users and resources. A privately held company headquartered in Petaluma, California, Caymas has customers in healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, information technology, retail, education, and government, both in the U.S. and abroad. For more information visit www.caymas.com.