WatchGuard vs Others

Every single one of our security services comes from a mature, best-in-class partner, who has focused solely on that particular security service for years, sometimes decades. Meanwhile, many of our competitors are just now trying to develop these services themselves, years behind our best in class partners. Even the ones who do partner with a few good outside experts do not do it for all their services, and sometimes lack features and services we have. Finally, one of them recognizes the benefit of best-in-class service, but only offers the option at an added expense.

Gateway Anti-virus:
As mentioned, WatchGuard partner with AVG and Kaspersky to bring best-in-class malware detect to our security appliances. Both of the companies have been in business, focused exclusively on catching malware for well over a decade. This experience means their technology is more mature, and quite frankly better than competitors who have just started looking at AV.

URL Filtering:
What’s the best way to get best-in-class URL filtering? Simple. WachGuard partner with the #1 vendor in stand-alone web security, which is WebSense. Most agree, WebSense is the #1 name in stand-alone web security. In fact, according to IDC, they have earned the most stand-alone web security appliance revenue for four years in a row.
They are a very experienced and mature company that has done URL filtering and web security for decades. In fact, they’ve been doing it almost a decade longer than any of our UTM competitors have, who just started with their own in-house solutions.
And they provide the most accurate, timely, and category rich URL Database on the market.

AntiSpam:
For antispam, we also partner with an industry leader in Antispam and email security, CYREN (formerly known as Commtouch). Unlike our competitors who try to do everything themselves, CYREN 100% focused on email security and antispam, which means they can do it much better.
They are a very experienced and mature email security company that has done Antispam for decades, which you can see in this chart. CYREN has blocked spam since 1991, while our UTM competitors have only started in the 21st century. This experience translated to better results. And, of course, some competitors don’t even offer antispam at all.
Why is Commtouch so good at blocking spam? They patented the Recurrent Pattern Detection (RPD) antispam engine, which is the only antispam solution that offers extremely quick and accurate detection, while maintaining a very small footprint on the appliances it runs on. In other words, it is a perfect antispam solution for UTM appliances, like ours.

IPS & Application Control:
Both our IPS and Application Control security services come from TrendMicro, a Best-in-Class security partner who has focused diligently on effectively detecting network attacks for years. They specialize on deeply analyzing network traffic, both to prevent attacks and to identify different kinds of applications . Their DPI engine leverages both signatures and more advanced pattern-based detection techniques to quickly and accurately identify applications, down to their granular behavior details.

TrendMicro also provides our application control engine, which is just as effective as IPS. Our Application Control services can recognize over 1800 applications (using over 2300 signatures), which is more than many other competitors with applications control.

RED (Reputation Enabled Defense):
When WatchGuard acquired Borderware, we gained their industry-leading, 3rd generation IP reputation authority -- a cloud-based reputation security service that increases your network’s security, while also increasing it’s performance. By aggregating know security feeds and gathering dynamic, real-time intelligence from all WatchGuard’s appliances, our cloud-based authority generates a real-time database of the known malicious IPs and URLs on the internet.
Borderware, and now WatchGuard, was one of the first companies to launch a “3rd-generation” IP Reputation Authority. While most reputation authorities settle for aggregating static blacklists, our 3rd-generation authority combines aggregated lists, with volume, and appliance feedback, to get a much more dynamic and real-time view of malicious sites on the internet. The difference is like comparing an old-school passport check to a full X-ray and bodyscan.
WatchGuard then extended our 3rd-generation IP reputation authority to combat malicious URLs and web threats, pioneering a URL reputation authority for our UTM appliances. This URL reputation authority combines best-in-class URL blacklists, such as those from malwaredomains and phishtank, with AV feedback from our appliances. Since our AV comes from best-in-class partners, our reputation authority is feed with this best-in-class, real-time intelligence.

The “magic” of our reputation authority comes from the thousands and thousands of XTM and XCS appliances we have in the field. All these appliances share real-time feedback with our reputation cloud, ensuring that you are protected from the latest, ever-changing malware sites and IPs.