Alcatel-Lucent's new OS helps secure networks

PARIS: Alcatel-Lucent has announced a new operating system (OS) including an advanced set of features that enable IT departments to quickly and easily secure their network and unify access control for users and devices across an entire network according to established security policies. With this new system, available on the OmniSwitch family of LAN switches, IT administrators can also deliver network access to employees and guests while still securing corporate assets.

“IT departments want and need security solutions that are effective and easy to deploy. Alcatel-Lucent provides a set of global capabilities that enable any company or IT manager to secure their network quickly and easily and recognize a broader business value in policy-enabled security,” said Michel Emelianoff, Alcatel-Lucent vice president enterprise security solutions.

“Our closer integration with InfoExpress CyberGatekeeper and this advanced feature set will enable organizations to protect sensitive corporate information while still supporting evolving technology needs – such as VoIP and mobility – in the enterprise,” he added.

Alcatel-Lucent customer, HanseatiCContor, providing outsourcing of sales and marketing resources to clients, has deployed InfoExpress CyberGatekeeper Host Integrity Check (HIC). The company needed a proven, enterprise-class network access control solution to ensure the laptops used by its partners and consultants have the latest software patches and anti-virus protection. In addition, InfoExpress CyberGatekeeper checks each endpoint to ensure it is not running any peer-to-peer applications in accordance with corporate security policies. Endpoints that are out of compliance are immediately quarantined and remediated.

About Alcatel-Lucent Operating System 6.3.4

This new release expands the OmniSwitches security features set enabling:

* The network to evaluate and enforce endpoint device health: With the CyberGatekeeper Host Integrity Check agent now integrated into the OmniSwitch, it will restrict end-user access to remediation servers only.

* The creation of easily defined "user profiles" mapped to network and security policies: This allows an IT manager to set user profiles based on an individual’s role in the organization that define access for network, application, priority, bandwidth and compliance needs.

* The delivery of captive portal as an explicit, web-based user authentication option: Captive portal captures packets for a non-authenticated user and redirects to a predefined web page that asks the user to provide his credentials to be authenticated before being allowed to the network. This is in addition to already available authentication methods through Alcatel-Lucent Access Guardian and safely allows controlled network access for guests with uncontrolled endpoint devices.

In addition, this AOS release brings an entire set of new features improving network availability, performance and uptime, with in particular ethernet ring protection (ERP), compliant with ITU-T G.8032 standard, maintaining a loop-free topology, data path redundancy and fast recovery times of less than 50 milliseconds for ethernet ring topologies.