Cisco Security Agent 4.0.1. Cisco Systems, (408) 526-4000, (800) 553-6387. www.platformlogic.com.
Grade: B
Take CSA, give it a less intuitive management interface, and you have AppFire Suite. AppFire has two management interfaces. From the Enterprise Manager you assign policies to servers and make canned policy changes. Then you use the Authoring Environment to make more detailed policy-file adjustments.
Canned policies make life easier, and AppFire is the only product we tested to have a canned policy for Exchange servers as well as for SQL and IIS. It was easy to change canned settings, for example, to allow or deny traffic to certain IP addresses; block modification of files by any program; and turn protection on or off for certain services. On the downside, creating policies was quite confusing, and we could look at only one policy at a time. It was difficult to see and understand what the policy was actually doing. Crafting a policy requires some hefty training or manual reading. In contrast, Cisco's product let us create a policy without reading the directions.
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