Watchguard make firewalls and other network devices, and related management and monitoring software.
Watchguard (http://www.watchguard.com) is an American network security company, which creates firewalls, wireless access points and associated network security devices, management and monitoring software.
Their main products include:
The Watchguard XTM firewall range
These are targeted at small to medium businesses, and they focus on being feature-rich with network features (site-to-site VPNs, remote user VPNs, firewall clustering, multiple WAN connections, VLANs, QoS and bandwidth reservations, bandwidth limits and very configurable firewall policies), high level control and monitoring of network traffic and internet use (website blocking by category, specific application blocking, per-user and per-group policies) and defense-in-depth with integrated security services (AntiVirus, AntiSpam, Intrusion Prevention signatures, deep packet inspection and protocol analysis for HTTP/HTTPS/FTP/DNS/etc.).
Watchguard firewalls are available as small office devices (XTM 2 and XTM 3 series) with optional integrated WiFi, fullsize rackmount devices for central offices and datacenters (other XTM and M devices), and as virtual machines (the XTMv range) for VMware and Hyper-V deployment.
Their business model is to have a standard firewall software offering, with the more advanced features available by purchasing licensing upgrades, and to have the same management tools, configuration format and monitoring apply up and down the hardware range. The hardware range is differentiated by processing power, memory and number of interfaces of different speeds, although some of the advanced features are unavailable on the smallest models or the XTMv virtual firewalls.
Watchguard XCS Range
The XCS devices are dedicated email filtering devices, with detailed control of users and groups, attachments, content scanning and filtering.
Watchguard AP range
These are wireless access points]1 designed to be used with a Watchguard firewall. The configuration is done as part of the firewall configuration and the access points pick up their settings from the firewall.
Watchguard SSL range
Dedicated SSL VPN portal device for end user access to a central site. They offer The features in these are increasingly included in by the newer firewall firmwares,
Their software includes
Watchguard System Manager
The desktop version of the firewall management software, it comes in two parts - firebox system manager for connecting to a firewall and seeing live status, traffic log messages, running diagnostic commands, and policy manager for editing the firewall policies and general device configuration.
Their firewalls also have a web interface for policy configuration, which is increasingly where Watchguard's focus is going.
Watchguard Dimension
A virtual machine appliance which integrates logging from Watchguard firewalls, alerting from those logs, and analysing the logs and presenting a web interface of the results.
The analysis covers things like bandwidth use per policy, per host, per server, per connection type. Internet access / website use per user or group. Numbers of connections per policy. Attacks detected, and their sources. Usage levels at different times of day, and so on.
Watchguard LogServer and ReportServer
These are Windows services which accept encrypted logging connections from Watchguard firewalls and store them in a PostgreSQL database, it can send email email alerts on firewall log events.
ReportServer analyses the logs and generates reports of internet traffic use, bandwidth use, and so on.
Both of these are being replaced by Watchguard Dimension.
Watchguard Central Management Server
A Windows service which manages firewalls, giving a single place to connect to for firewall management. It can save configuration revision histories, show diffs, and allow configuration rollback, schedule configuration changes and firmware upgrades, and has some support for firewall policy templates and VPN templates.
Utility software
Single-Sign-On helper services, for installing on Windows domain controllers, desktops, and Exchange servers - usable in different combinations to support different ways the firewalls can detect which network traffic is linked to which users and mobile devices.
SSL VPN Client - a VPN client for laptop and desktop users connecting to the SSL VPN service on Watchguard firewalls.
