Access to streaming video from sites such as YouTube.com is sometimes useful, but is often abused. Blocking these sites might work, but a preferable approach is to limit the total bandwidth given to streaming video, regardless of where it comes from. This also applies to streaming audio sites such online music radio stations and personalized …
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Now let’s assume your existing anti-spam protection can detect and block a normal outbound email that contains “Company Confidential” information. But what if an employee uses a Web Mail service, such as Yahoo or Gmail, to send out “Company Confidential” information? Create a policy to block “Company Confidential” attachments in Web traffic 1. The Deep …
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In some companies, outbound email does not pass through their Email Security system, or that system does not check the content of email attachments. In either case “Company Confidential” attachments can easily leave the organization. Since outbound network traffic goes through your firewall, you can detect and block this “data-in-motion.” Create a policy to block email attachments which …
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Is a connection to an IP in a foreign country from your local neighborhood office or a branch site just a benign connection from somebody browsing on the Web, or is it botnet activity? You can use application intelligence as a powerful forensics tool to identify exactly what’s happening on your network. View connections by country or create …
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Network security must be at the forefront of any IT administrator’s focus. The ability to prevent malware such as viruses, spyware, keyloggers, Trojans and intrusion attempts from entering the network at the gateway relieves the organization from great risk and spares potentially wasted resources. Block viruses, spyware and other malware at the gateway before it …
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What do you do if your CEO complains that the business news videos that he wants to watch every morning are choppy and won’t play correctly? After investigation, you determine that it’s due to a company-wide bandwidth management policy that you implemented for all streaming video? You could ease off on the bandwidth restrictions for …
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What’s happening on my network? Who’s wasting my bandwidth? Why is my network so slow? Have you ever asked yourself any of these questions? You could use a combination of separate tools to try to get answers, but this process is time consuming, and will only provide you with information after-the-fact. With SonicWALL’s real-time visualization …
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Social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have become new channels of communications for individuals and for companies. While it might be counterproductive to block all social networking applications, you may want to control how they can be used in the workplace. For example, you may want to let marketing personnel update the …
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Unproductive peer-to-peer (P2P) applications such as BitTorrent are often used to download unlicensed versions of copyrighted media, and can quickly consume bandwidth or transmit malware. However, the creation of new P2P applications, or simple changes (e.g., version numbers) to the existing P2P applications happen all the time so it is difficult to manually block any single P2P application. …
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Many mission-critical applications, such as Live Meeting, Salesforce.com and SharePoint, are cloud-based, or run across geographically dispersed networks. Ensuring that these applications have priority over unproductive Web surfing improves business productivity. Create a security policy to give bandwidth priority to the Live Meeting application 1. The Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine looks for the application …
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