Today's corporate environment necessitates connectivity on a global scale to promote efficient business practices. All types of users, including employees, partners, vendors, telecommuters, clients etc., require access to the resources they need, when they need them. Network and IT administrators leverage technologies, such as the Internet, to cost-effectively connect all of these users to the network. However, this connectivity also increases the network's points of vulnerability. It offeres a "way in" for attackers, who are looking to steal, alter or bring down the company's most critical assets. The challenge facing administrators is how to enable "always on" connectivity for business productivity, but shut it down for unauthorized and malicious use.

Paramount in association with Netscreen delivers a line of purpose-built security appliances and systems that integrate firewall, VPN, denial of service protection and traffic management functions within a single, comprehensive, high-performance platform. Netscreen firewalls operate at wirespeed by integrating silicon and RISC-based processing with a custom real-time operating system, designed exclusively for stateful packet inspection.

By establishing a strong perimeter defense between trusted and untrusted networks, a properly developed firewall becomes the foundation for enterprise network security. But firewalls do not act alone -- they should always be your first line of defense, deployed in conjunction with complementary measures that protect the entire enterprise from both outsider and insider threats. For example, most enterprises combine a strong perimeter defense with intrusion detection and desktop and server protection.

Netscreen devices offer integrated firewall, network address translation (NAT), and virtual private network services. Combining these security measures within a single platform can greatly simplify network design. Furthermore, Netscreen devices integrated smoothly with thirdparty security products like Websense content filtering, Webtrends log analysis and reporting, and RADIUS, SecurID and LDAP user authentication servers. For added protection against single-point-of-failure, NetScreen devices provide server loading balancing and can be deployed in redundant pairs for high availability.