UUNET SA TEAMS UP WITH LOCAL SECURITY SOFTWARE DEVELOPER, CEQURUX

Cape Town, June, 2000: UUNET SA, the country's leading corporate Internet infrastructure provider, has entered into a collaborative marketing agreement with the country's leading security software developer, CEQURUX.

Says UUNET SA's John Plaskett: "Security is the single biggest issue for companies acquiring or running networks - whether they are LANs, WANs or VPNs - and our customers look to us to recommend a reliable security system for them.

"We have opted for CEQURUX because their products are priced to fall within the budget of our smaller network (64 k up to 256 k) customers while supplying features comparable to those of more expensive vendors.

"CEQURUX products run on any Intel-based platform - including single PCs - and they include in one box features that most other vendors sell separately - including proxy-based security. Amongst other advantages such as simplification of architecture, having all the features in one package allows faster throughput on a firewall than most other systems.

"At the same time, CEQURUX products are scalable to large organisations and can be used in multiple offices. We have CEQURUX security in our Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Port Elizabeth offices."

CEQURUX, founded by early leaders in South African Internet technology, is based in Amsterdam with its research and development headquarters in Cape Town.

"Having the developers in Cape Town allows extremely fast turn-around on customer-specific adaptations to the software," says Plaskett.

For all but the very large corporations, high-end Internet network security systems are prohibitively expensive. As a result, smaller companies avoid buying security systems and hope for the best. Larger corporations tend to buy the most complex systems, trusting that they will have the features to cover all security eventualities. For most organisations, security is a grudge purchase.

Christo Brits, CEQURUX channel manager, says. "We develop our products to make no-compromise security affordable, quick to install and easy to manage on any size of network. The fact that security systems are essential to an organisation is no reason for their acquisition and management to be a punitive exercise - financially or otherwise.

"Our agreement with UUNET SA marks the first time in this country that a network provider and security developer have worked together on making it easier for customers to protect their business and network assets - by saving them time and money.

CEQURUX products provide for Internet access control, protecting the enterprise from unauthorised access to internal network resources and allowing management of internal access to external resources.

They also enable Internet virtual private networks (VPNs), ensuring that data in transmission across public networks remains unreadable to unauthorised recipients.

Additional features include an integrated virus scanner - which breaks email attachments into separate components, each of which is scanned individually by the virus engine allowing offending messages to be blocked, cleaned, or passed on to the user with a virus alert report; intrusion detection - using low-level protocol analysis to detect stealth intrusion attempts; strong user authentication - protecting services through the use of sophisticated, software-based user identification systems; and content management - offering filtering of data based on certain content types (blocking access to spam, banner ads, Java script, and unauthorised websites).

The system also provides accounting support for enterprise management systems by monitoring traffic and providing data on Internet usage.

UUNET SA and CEQURUX will work through approved third parties to install CEQURUX systems.

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