The BorderWare Security Platform is a core offering of the vendor, upon which runs their individual BorderWare Email Security Gateway, BorderWare Web Security Gateway, and BorderWare IM Security Gateway products. These individual modules can be purchased by the customer as needed.

The platform itself provides shared services and single-platform management features; including the ability to define central protection policies that apply to each of the modules (E-mail, Web, and IM) for both inbound (anti-virus and spam, for example) and outbound (content filtering and automated encryption, for example) messaging. Clustered and redundant deployments are supported, in which a single appliance is configured, with processing automatically distributed across multiple devices. In such a configuration, the vendor notes that the platform can range from two to hundreds of devices, scaling to support the processing of upwards of 10 million messages and communications per hour. Additionally, appliance clusters support redundancy (replication) of both configuration settings and message queues; i.e., copies of all message and communication queues are replicated across the cluster and are delivered should a member of the cluster be unavailable.

The three key offerings currently within the BorderWare Security Platform include:

- BorderWare Email Security Gateway (formerly BorderWare MXtreme), which provides both outbound and inbound messaging analysis and protective capabilities.

At the core of the BorderWare Email Security Gateway is the Intercept Engine, which scans for such threats as spam (including image spam), viruses, spyware, phishing, Denial of Service, Directory Harvest Attacks, and others. The Intercept Engine additionally leverages the vendor's BorderWare Security Network--the collective real-time knowledge gathered from better than 8,000 of the vendor's customer systems--in order to prevent malicious senders by identifying their global reputation or behavior.

Other features of the BorderWare Email Security Gateway include outbound message scanning for sensitive information, private data, or offensive language; and selective automated message encryption based on keywords or phrases found within the E-mail message.

- BorderWare Web Security Gateway, which provides real-time protection specifically for Web-related traffic (entering or leaving). Features include keyword and objectionable content filtering; comparison of both embedded and destination URLs to the vendor's categorized DB (over 21 million sites, as of this writing) for filtering; download blocking by file type; and support for Web site reputation based filtering via the BorderWare Security Network (see above).

- BorderWare IM Security, which applies the platform's real-time protective and monitoring capabilities specifically to IM-based threats. The vendor states that the product works with "... the most popular IM clients ..." and support is included for policy application at the organizational or individual user level; as well as filtering, logging, and monitoring of IM content.

The BorderWare Security Platform is available now. Visit the BorderWare Technology Web site for further information.