Panda Security Bears Watching

This offering consists of both an SaaS portion, Panda Managed Office Protection (PMOP), and an appliance, the Panda GateDefender Performa. The device didn't blow us away with its feature set, however, it is a good, solid security offering that would be a good fit for SMBs.

We took a look at the GateDefender 9100 model. Although this product has a gamut of UTM features, we wanted to test how it handles Web content filtering. Panda is known for its security software solutions. The advent into the appliance space is a fairly new one for the company; that fact stoked our curiosity about how this device would fare in testing.

The GateDefender 9100 is Panda's software installed onto a Sun Fire X2100 Linux box. The GateDefender differs from some other security appliances in that it does not route traffic. It acts as a transparent bridge that scans inbound and outbound traffic on the following protocols and their default associated ports: HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4 and NNTP. Solution providers can specify additional ports for clients' networks. At this time, the GateDefender does not scan against HTTPS traffic, although that feature, according to Panda, is soon to come.

Since the GateDefender does not act as a router, it can easily be integrated into an existing network, without any changes to the architecture. For testing, we simply plugged one Ethernet cable into our router and another into the test LAN's switch.

Once connected, an administrator can browse to the default console IP address of the device. This evokes the management interface. Upon initial use, the system requires activation. This is done using log-in credentials supplied by Panda. These credentials are passed to Panda's cloud and the licensed modules for the device are activated.

The status page of the interface displays status on modules such as antimalware, antispam, content filter, and IM/P2P application and Web filter. There is also a breakdown of each module's content that was restricted or flagged in some way.

Content filtering is intuitive to set up. You can exclude specific files from the filter, or you can enable the HTML page filter.

Application filtering is a separate module. Administrators can restrict access to the major IM applications or to P2P programs like BitTorrent.

Restrictions can be set on all selected applications, but there were no easily discernible way to set restrictions on a particular application.

For testing, we enabled maximum-level restrictions against BitTorrent and MSN Messenger. We also blocked access to any Web sites categorized under "Games/Gambling" and restricted access through anonymous proxies -- a favorite way for students to circumvent a school's firewall. We also set up logging whenever a blocked page was accessed. In this Web filtering section of the interface, administrators can edit the warning page shown to users who access blocked content. The warning page allows for basic text editing; there didn't seem to be a way to add images, for example, a company logo.

Panda's GateDefender Performa is part of the vendor's Managed Office Protection Platinum program. It's a heroic effort on the part of Panda to take on so many threats -- antimalware, embedded Web threats, and more. However, a little more robustness in the interface, plus working out a few minor kinks could potentially turn this very good product into a stellar one.