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Panda GateDefender Performa 9100 review

By Dave Mitchell, 3 Sep 2009

Rating:

Price as reviewed:£5500 exc. VAT All features, 1yr update subscription

Panda latest appliance delivers web content security at the network perimeter. The anti-spam measures are near perfect but are its other features as good?

Next you use protection profiles to tie your settings together with network definitions. This enables you to create multiple policies so you can apply different AUPs to users, groups and systems and tie them in with AD authentication if required. We found policies easy enough to create but did note that the IM and P2P module only offers global security restrictions and cannot be included in settings management.

Panda claims an ‘almost 100 per cent’ anti-spam success rate and after testing the 9100 for a week in a live environment we can honestly say we agree. This feature comes courtesy of CloudMark and to test it we left it on its default settings and configured Outlook clients to download mail from live accounts.
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The web filtering module offers plenty of categories although its performance isn’t great.
We asked the appliance to tag suspect messages and pass them on where our clients’ Outlook rules moved them into separate folders. At the end of the live test we found a single, solitary spam message had slipped through whilst only five messages were incorrectly tagged as spam.

Web site filtering is handled by Cobion, which offers over twenty main URL categories under which you have more than sixty sub-categories to pick and choose from. Unfortunately, Cobion proved to be less capable at its job that the CloudMark anti-spam.
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The anti-malware module provides stiff protection measures that can be customised to suit.
To test filtering we blocked the gaming and gambling categories and Googled for online poker and bingo sites. Of the forty poker sites we visited we were blocked from all but six. However, in our search for bingo games we were allowed through to over a third of those visited.

From the anti-malware module you can configure virus scanning on all or just selected protocols and when a virus is detected the appliance can attempt to clean or delete it. A quarantine area is provided where emails it was unable to clean will be placed, whilst for HTTP and FTP you can have the transmission blocked.