Research and Markets: In Response to Customer Concerns, Many Vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco and Check Point have Developed and are Now Strongly Pushing Firewalls with Application Filtering Capabilities.

DUBLIN, Ireland -- Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c32527) has announced the addition of Application- Level Firewalling to their offering.

Application-level firewalling has been a hot topic now for the last 18 months with large enterprises and government agencies deploying such solutions to protect their mission-critical & sensitive applications. Understanding the market, however, depends on what exactly is meant by "application-level firewalling".

This report examines the differences between network-level and application-level firewalling. It looks at the impact of the ICSA application-level firewalling certification program for the industry and provides opinions on how both small and large firewall vendors can benefit from the new program.

The failure of network-level firewalls to prevent many attacks delivered via application level protocols (layer 7 of the Open Systems Interconnection Reference Model (OSI Model or OSI Reference Model)) has led to a strong push by vendors of so-called application-level firewalls that are designed to protect customers against such attacks.

In response to customer concerns, many of the larger vendors such as Microsoft, Cisco and Check Point have developed and are now strongly pushing firewalls with application filtering capabilities.

Smaller vendors, however, are claiming that much of this is just marketing hype and that in reality the solutions from some of the large network firewall vendors provide no way near as much protection as those produced by smaller vendors such as Teros (soon to be part of Citrix) and F5.

Reasons to order your copy:

--Provides actionable advice for all vendors in the firewall market

--Presents an independent, third-party opinion on the direction of the market

--Highlights key opportunities for both large and small operators

Topics covered in the report include:

--4 key things you need to know about the application-level firewalling market

--Dedicated application-level firewall vendors should embrace the ICSA certification as quickly as possible to differentiate their solutions from those they feel are not true substitutes.

--Application awareness

--2 ways to beat application-level attacks

--The ICSA factor

--All vendors launching application-level firewalling products that are based on behavior learning should back up solutions with signature-based filtering to avoid excessive false positive rates.

--Learning history's lessons

--Smaller vendors struggling to gain mindshare should look to ensure that their products work effectively with managed security services and SIM vendors - and that they partner with systems integrators to tap into their customer bases.

--Working with SIM vendors and MSSPs

--Systems integrators

--Larger vendors may need to consider acquisitions or partnerships to fill the perceived gaps in their portfolio as the ICSA definition makes the differences between their solutions and those of more pure-play vendors more apparent.

--Getting certified 

--Biting the bullet - going down the acquisition trail

--Integrating solutions - so that customers will not have to

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c32527

Source: Datamonitor