[ISN] Check Point boss snipes at Microsoft's security

From: InfoSec News (alerts@private)
Date: Fri Jun 08 2007 - 07:05:50 PDT


http://www.techworld.com/security/news/index.cfm?newsID=9058

By Raphael Fogel
TheMarker.com
07 June 2007

Check Point's chief executive has taken a swing at rival Microsoft, 
saying its security products leave a lot to be desired.

Gil Shwed, also founder of the firewall vendor, made his remarks during 
a lecture on the global security market, before a group of network 
security managers at an IDC security conference in Israel.

"Microsoft has been in the security market for more than ten years. It 
has firewall, VPN, anti-virus capabilities and disk encryption," Shwed 
said. "But it doesn't have the leading products in any of them, and 
apparently, the management and integration levels of its products is 
unsatisfactory."

For a decade, Microsoft has been offering an enterprise firewall, the 
ISA server, but Check Point for one hasn't been running into them in the 
field, Shwed said.

He went on to criticise Microsoft's security products more specifically. 
Since Microsoft began setting its Windows Firewall as the default in 
Windows XP, Check Point has built a $50-million-a-year business in 
personal firewalls alone.

And that, said Shwed, means that Microsoft's personal Windows firewall 
can't be doing the job that users want, if the Israeli company's 
personal firewall business remained healthy.

He refrained from mentioning other rivals like Cisco and Juniper. But he 
did say that security managers at major enterprises don't want to delve 
into the nuts and bolts of the security systems and components under 
offer. What they really want is a certificate guaranteeing that the 
security systems and components meet the regulations.

They want to know their systems will be safe. They care less how that's 
achieved.

Most companies use multiple security systems, each protecting a 
different aspect of the enterprise systems. That is not good, Shwed 
elaborated the obvious: what they need is a single platform that will 
do, or manage, it all for them. And to no great surprise, he said that 
Check Point was close to providing such a platform.


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