Greenborder Secures PCs By Using Isolation Zone

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company last week released GreenBorder Professional 2.7, an updated version of its “desktop DMZ” software for the Windows environment that plugs into Internet Explorer and Outlook and runs traffic in an isolation zone, said Jim Fulton, vice president of marketing at the security startup. The company launched its first product in March.

“GreenBorder&s approach to security is a little more pessimistic than most. It intercepts all attempts to access system resources and ensures that they never get out of the isolation zone,” he said. The virtual environment is “flushed away” when users refresh, he said.

Version 2.7 allows administrators to prevent users from turning off the software, Fulton said. It also adds support for Norton Internet Security Center 2004 and 2005, McAfee 9.0, Trend Micro PC-Cillin, ZoneAlarm Personal Firewall and Nortel VPNs.

GreenBorder also is launching its first partner program with the goal of attaining 100 percent channel distribution, Fulton said. The program includes lead generation and deal registration, marketing funds and technical support for VAR partners. Solution providers also can join as referral partners.

The company&s approach to security “really stands out,” said Andrew Clark, CEO of Cirion Technologies, a Grafton, Mass.-based solution provider that signed on with GreenBorder in June.

Rather than assessing trusted vs. untrusted content, the software lets everything run in a virtual environment, Clark said. “This really solves a problem,” he said. “Browsing is only run on a virtual copy of your machine, so your host machine is never affected. And when a user clicks refresh, the whole virtual copy gets wiped out.”

For VARs, the biggest challenge in selling GreenBorder is that it&s such a new approach, Clark added. “We are getting very positive response. People are very interested,” he said. “But it is going to take some time to turn the interest into sales.”