The iPrism appliance line from St. Bernard Software provide Internet filtering capabilities to the organization; for specified, categorized Web sites, for anti-virus protection, and for IM/P2P traffic. The devices are offered as the "Hybrid," or "h-Series" product line, ranging from the 10h--a mini-1U form factor with a single 80 GB drive, an Intel Pentium 4 processor, and traffic throughput of 10 Mb/sec--through 5 models to the 100h, a 1U appliance with dual, 500 GB hot-swappable (RAID 1 protected) SATA drives, dual Intel Quad-Core 3.0 GHz processors, and traffic throughput of 100+ Mb/sec.

Key filtering features of the appliances are focused on Web site, anti-virus, and IM/P2P filtering.

Web site filtering is accomplished via the vendor's iGuard database of categorized Web sites. The DB places Web site URLs in over 80 categories and sub-categories, and customizable categories are available that can then be used by administrators to define Web site access policies for the organization. The Security category, in particular, is populated with sites that are known to be harbingers of spyware, phishing attacks, or other malicious software. The iGuard database is entirely human-reviewed and defined. Regular updates provided daily, and the special Security category is updated as often as hourly.

A key feature of the iGuard database in particular is the vendor's iPrism Automated Rating Protocol, which automatically sends the most frequently visited (and currently unrated) URLs viewed by your organization to the iPrism team for classification and inclusion in the categorized iGuard database. The vendor states that most such sites are added back to the customer's DB within 24 hours.

Anti-virus capabilities of the product are provided courtesy of Authentium, and include real-time HTTP traffic scanning, and support for signature, heuristics, execution emulation, and behavioral virus-identification techniques.

Finally, IM/P2P blocking can be applied by the appliance as a result of its ability to identify, monitor and block specified IM and P2P traffic regardless of the port being used for the application.

Other features of iPrism include a Report Wizard for the creation of custom reports; real-time monitoring capabilities allowing administrators to view network traffic site-wide, by user, or only that traffic that violates policies; support for delegated administration to remote administrators; support for LDAP authentication; usage tracking reporting for all IM and P2P individual users; proxy support for remote users (allowing mobile users' traffic to be filtered by routing their communications through the central iPrism device); and support for anonymizer blocking. The latest release of the product, in particular, adds additional capabilities targeting the identification and blocking of anonymizer services; including "multi-layer anonymizer" protection which seeks to recognize anonymizer sites via both URL identification and proxy-pattern-based techniques, support for the detection of SSL spoofing, support for domain IP address map checks (cross-references IP addresses to their actual domains), and "concealed surfing" reports that report Web activities based on domain names instead of IP addresses.

iPrism is available now. Visit the St. Bernard Software Web site for further information.