VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORKS

One of the greatest benefits of the Internet is the ability to support remote working, allowing field based staff, home workers and branch offices to access the central network via a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

SmoothTunnel makes secure office-to-office VPN connections both simple and affordable. SmoothTunnel can support a wide variety of VPN connections, including other SmoothWall systems, Road Warriors using IPSec client software for Microsoft Windows™ and VPN solutions from other manufacturers.

CONTENT FILTER

The exponential growth of the web is making it increasingly difficult to keep objectionable and time wasting Internet content out of the workplace. With the addition of at least half a million new pages every day, traditional blacklist filtering techniques are becoming more and more unreliable. Yet, with surveys showing that up to 40% of all business Internet usage is not work-related, nobody can afford to ignore the problem.

SmoothGuardian is the most effective solution for blocking objectionable web content. Unlike other filtering products which rely on web site 'blacklists', Guardian dynamically analyses the content of received web pages for objectionable words and phrases.

BANDWIDTH MANAGEMENT

Few networks enjoy the luxury of an Internet connection with sufficient bandwidth to always be able to fully meet its user's demands for capacity. Network demand is not constant throughout the day nor from day to day, thus in the real world there are bound to be times when demand outstrips capacity. Providing enough bandwidth to be able to always meet the demand would be prohibitively expensive for most organisations. On the roads, traffic lights are used to regulate the traffic flow to ensure that all road users get a fair share of the capacity of the road network. Strangely enough most computer networks do not enjoy such apparently simple traffic control.

Small networks using a low cost DSL connection would benefit from improved performance by the use of Bandwidth Management technology. SmoothTraffic, the new Bandwidth Management module for SmoothWall, does exactly that.