News

Untangle Intros SD-WAN Router in New Security Framework

• By David Ramel
• 03/07/2019

Network security firm Untangle announced a new security framework that leverages new-age technologies such as software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) for its approach to provide security orchestration across the enterprise.

The Untangle Network Security Framework is designed to provide protection, monitoring and control for myriad components of a network, including associated devices, applications and events. The idea, the company said, is to put "IT back in control of dispersed networks, hybrid cloud environments and IoT and mobile devices."

To do that, several components are integrated into the framework, including the company's NG Firewall and Command Center that were already part of the firm's SD-WAN solution, along with two new products just unveiled: Micro Firewall and SD-WAN Router.

"Micro Firewall and SD-WAN Router extend Untangle's network security product family to the network edge and IoT devices, securing and optimizing a range of different networking scenarios to meet the needs of connected organizations," the San Jose, Calif.-based company said in an announcement this week.

The SD-WAN component, beyond providing advanced routing capabilities leading to network performance optimization, also includes its own firewall for built-in security.

"SD-WAN Router optimizes the network by accelerating the performance of WAN connections and links, using advanced, configurable routing techniques to ensure that traffic is sent across the local network and over the Internet in the most efficient manner," Untangle said.

SD-WAN is probably the hottest segment of the game-changing software-centric movement in enterprise networking that incorporates software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV) and related approaches. Benefits include disaggregation of network control from hardware devices that enables the use of white-box commodity hardware, programmability, agility and more.

Some enterprises are turning to SD-WAN, for example, to move off legacy on-premises MPLS-based WANs that weren't designed for modern multi-cloud environments. SD-WAN can provide cost savings among those other benefits by tying together multiple networks that might span multiple cloud platforms or other distributed implementations so they can be controlled as one.

The new Micro Firewall also leverages cutting-edge technology, the company said, but of the artificial intelligence variety. "Untangle Micro Firewall is a purpose-built, lightweight, containerized firewall with proprietary, patent-pending Predictive Routing, an AI-based routing service that predetermines network traffic routing paths based on historical patterns and machine learning, enabling fast routing of traffic as soon as criteria are recognized, bringing Layer 7 application-level packet steering to Layer 3 to intelligently process all traffic, regardless of whether or not it is encrypted."

Untangle, which targets small and medium-size organizations with its wares, said Micro Firewall and SD-WAN Router will be available early in the second quarter of this year.