EXCLUSIVE: Astaro Security Gateway 120 Appliance

Anti-virus measures are activated from the web and mail proxies and Astaro uses both Authentium and the open source ClamAV although it's a shame Astaro dropped Kaspersky as this vendor has always had a good reputation. Web content filtering comes courtesy of Cobion which is now under the auspices of IBM. From the HTTP proxy page you have eighteen main categories to play with and each of these have up to seven sub-categories attached which can also be customised to suit. During testing we found the filtering worked well with the appliance blocking all our attempts to accessed banned sites and providing a warning webpage for each transgression.

Anti-spam measure are activated separately for the POP3 and SMTP proxies and Astaro employs a range of detection methods including RBLs, heuristics, a spam database and reverse DNS lookups. We found these worked well with only a small number of spam messages slipping past them. The appliance's quarantine area can be accessed directly from the web interface where you can review all dodgy messages being held and release or delete them.

The SSL-VPN feature is actually rather limited as you simply provide a list of users and groups that are allowed to call in and which local network objects they are allowed to access. The ASG 120 provides controls over seven IM apps including AIM, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger and eight P2P apps such as Bittorrent and Gnutella and allows you block them or alert you to their use. You don't get anywhere near the same level of control as dedicated security appliances but Astaro does let you block file transfers for each listed IM application.

With such an extensive range of security features on offer reporting needs to be good and Astaro doesn't disappoint. For each proxy you get a real-time rundown on the top web domains being accessed, the busiest users and the top blocked sites along with the top email senders and receivers and even the worst spam countries. The Executive Report option provides a complete summary of the day's activities which, for us, extended to no less than eight pages of reports and graphs.

Considering the price includes unlimited user support, the ASG 120 is offering a lot for your money. More memory wouldn't have gone amiss and some feature such as SSL-VPNs and IM/P2P controls are fairly basic but the main players in Astaro's team look capable of delivering a highly effective and affordable network security blanket to the majority of small businesses.