Sourcefire Announces Industry's First Automated Real-Time Compliance Solution
Tuesday, 6 June 2006 14:27 EST



Open source innovator, Sourcefire, Inc., the world leader in network intrusion prevention, today announced the industry's first automated network compliance solution, enabled by the next generation of Sourcefire's groundbreaking Real-time Network Awareness (RNA) technology. Customers can now turn RNA's real-time knowledge of network composition and traffic behavior into a compliance policy at the click of a mouse.

Historically, compliance monitoring has been an iterative process where compliance audits were performed as infrequently as once per year. Even for the most diligent compliance administrators, defining compliance policies in complex business environments has been an overwhelming task. RNA 4.0 directly addresses both of these challenges - turning compliance into a truly real-time process while also making the definition and enforcement of IT policies highly automated and easy to maintain.

"Just as Sourcefire served to define the self-securing network, it is again re-defining critical aspects of real-time network compliance enforcement," says EMA Senior Analyst, Scott Crawford. "Auditors are taking a dim view of companies that simply report on compliance at isolated points in time. The demands of maintaining network security coupled with mandates to assure continuous compliance oblige administrators to maintain compliance on a persistent basis."

Only the fifth product in history to receive an NSS Gold-rating, RNA is a passive network and endpoint discovery tool that continuously monitors the network and maintains a persistent inventory of the composition and behavior of every active endpoint on a network. Compositional details include type, vendor, and version information for all running operating systems, ports, protocols, services, and network applications. RNA is also able to detect virtually any change in composition or behavior in real-time.

With RNA 4.0, Sourcefire customers will now be able to define and set compliance policies for endpoints, subnets, or networks with the click of a mouse. Once defined, any change outside of policy would result in immediate notification followed by an array of possible corrective actions, including the sending of an alert, redirection of the asset into a 'sandbox' or quarantined network, blocking some or all traffic to or from the asset, and corrective measures such as patch and configuration management. RNA 4.0 will also include a sophisticated, yet very easy to use, compliance dashboard that will allow administrators to monitor and report on compliance in real-time.

"RNA was invented to provide the real-time-all-of-the-time network intelligence needed to transform the efficiency of network intrusion detection and prevention," said Martin Roesch, Sourcefire founder and the creator of Snort. "With the 'One-click Compliance' functionality of RNA 4.0, our customers will be able to realize similarly dramatic gains in efficiency as they enforce compliance with their IT security policy."

"Compliance can become a distraction from improving security" states Gartner Research Director Amrit Williams in a recent report, "Organizations should use compliance as an opportunity to implement technologies and processes that improve operational security."