Strata Guard is a line of intrusion detection and prevention offerings from StillSecure that are served as either soft appliances, or optionally as pre-loaded, Dell-based hardware appliances. The products are based on SNORT intrusion detection.

Strata Guard appliances can be deployed as needed within the Enterprise network, wherever attack traffic is feared (such as at the network gateway, between network segments, at the entry to the DMZ, etc.). The appliances can be deployed either inline, in which case direct intrusion prevention measures--including the immediate dropping of offending packets--can be employed; or out-of-band, for reporting, alerting, and forensics purposes.

Features of the product include:

- Automatically updated rule sets from the vendors security research team; the product can be configured to check for updates as often as hourly, with on-demand checks also supported.

- Support for multi-sensor deployments and central management of the deployed sensors through the vendor's Multi-node Manager. Sensor nodes can be grouped and managed in sets and subsets.

New in the latest release of the product is support for the sniffing of multiple network segments from a single appliance, and support for multi-gigabit throughput speeds; the latter, according to the vendor, made possible via "MG Accelerator" technology which is tuned for multi-core deployments. A single sensor can now support the monitoring of up to four network segments (eight if deployed in out-of-band mode) with throughputs of up to 4 Gb/sec.

Six hardware (appliance) versions of the product are available; ranging from the Strata Guard 50 with support for up to 50 Mb/sec of throughput to the Strata Guard 4G with support for up to 4 Gb/sec of overall throughput. Software versions are also available for each of these. pricing for the hardware appliances ranges from $5,000 to $20,000; while software only pricing is listed at $2,500 to $15,000.

Also available from the vendor is Strata Guard Lite (or Strata Guard Free), a free version of the product with support for throughputs of 5 Mb/sec or less. Strata Guard Lite is available for download in software and VMware virtual appliance flavors.

Strata Guard is available now. Visit the Strata Guard Web site for further information.