Sygate delivers first network access control solution to enforce security on Macintosh computers.

Sygate Technologies, the leading provider of Network Access Control (NAC) solutions, has announced it has extended its award-winning Sygate Secure Enterprise (SSE) software to Macintosh computers. The Sygate Security Agent for Macintosh is the first centrally managed security solution available for the popular Macintosh line.

The new Sygate agent provides enterprises running Macintosh computers a centrally-managed firewall and intrusion protection system. The firewall offers configuration rules to incoming and outgoing traffic based on ports, protocols, trusted IP addresses or applications. The new agent was developed in conjunction with Sygate's technology partner Intego, using Intego's flagship Mac security software NetBarrier X3. Sygate has been beta testing the new agent for several months with a variety of customers and recently began offering it to enterprise customers.

One of the beta testers was the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, WA, which has used the Sygate security solution on its PCs. The laboratory wanted to use Sygate on multiple platforms and asked specifically for a Mac agent to satisfy all the scientists who work there.

"The Mac users may constitute only a small percentage of the scientists, but providing equal protection to all scientists is highly important," explained Todd Krahenbuhl, a network engineer at PNNL and project manager for the Sygate installation. "We want to offer Sygate's protection against malicious access to everyone at PNNL."

"Sygate provides the most robust suite of NAC protections for the PC-based enterprise, and with this product we are introducing the concept of 'Compliance on Contact' to the Mac world," said Eric Winsborrow, director of product management, Sygate. "We are excited by the opportunity to include another important community of endpoints in our solution, protecting them from malicious access." Compliance on Contact is Sygate's term for the ability of its SSE software to ensure computers are configured correctly and free from viruses, worms and other malware before allowing them to connect to a data network.