Guest blog by Sapphire’s Dave Robinson

Harmony a Check Point and Avanan Collaboration

Most companies have moved away from traditional in-house on-premises hosted applications like file servers, mail servers and proxy servers for cloud-based services known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.  

One of the most popular SaaS platforms I have come across is Microsoft 365 Exchange Online. The cloud-based mail platform is accessible from anywhere offers no end of features, constantly evolving to meet organisational needs. Microsoft integrates its security and mail filtering capabilities into this platform.  

On-premises mail servers are generally behind an NGFW, configured to inspect inbound and outbound traffic flows. This is where Check Point comes into play.  

Check Point and Avanan Collaboration 

Check Point and Avanan formed a relationship and collaborated to create a platform combining various technologies to protect SaaS-based applications, including Exchange Online and several other SaaS applications such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Gmail and others.  

The platform features an intuitive interface allowing a single pane of glass overview of your entire SaaS security posture. I love how the security technologies used in the forum include Anti-Phishing, Anomaly Detection, Shadow-IT, ClickTime Protection, DLP, Threat Emulation, Threat Extraction, Antivirus and URL Reputation.  

Harmony Email & Collaboration Set-Up 

The platform is API based so that you can set it up in a few clicks. Policies can be configured to detect only at first while you get to grips with everything; you can then switch to detect and remediate or true in-line protection, so malicious emails are blocked before they hit your inbox.  

I found that, in the background, Check Point created an entirely in-house platform that extended on the original features. However, before being released, Check Point acquired Avanan.    

Harmony Endpoint

How can we ensure our staff are protected at all times? Whether working from home, a local cafe or the office. How can we protect our users from all types of threats, known or unknown? The ability to control and manage access to external resources and have complete visibility. It’s relatively straightforward with Harmony Endpoint, and the latest iteration is a cloud-based platform (SaaS). An on-premise solution is also available.

Harmony Endpoint offers a wide range of features, including: 

Traditional anti-virus, threat emulation & extraction, phishing protection, anti-bot, anti-ransomware, anti-exploit, category-based URL Filtering, autonomous detection and response, and not forgetting threat hunting. Check Point also includes their in-house disk and media encryption and support for native encryption technologies like BitLocker & FileVault. 

The feature-rich platform is well known to be the top of the game for endpoint protection, supporting Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS & Linux operating systems.

With the recent acquisition, I expect that we will see some tweaks and new additions to the existing platform in the future. Watch this space!

Dave Robinson, Sapphire, Security Support Engineer.

 

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