Cambridge, UK (April 8, 2001) – The NSS Group, Europe’s leading independent security testing organisation, has awarded its coveted Gold Award to CyberGuard STARLord. This is only the fourth such award to be issued in the four year history of the award system, placing STARLord amongst a very select group of products.

After careful consideration and extensive testing, the Gold Award was achieved through excellence in the following areas:

• Performance – STARLord provided some of the “cleanest” results found during extensive penetration testing
  
• Power – On the software side, CyberGuard combines stateful inspection, static packet filters and powerful proxies to cover all eventualities. On the hardware side, the inclusion of multiple processors, large amounts of RAM and Gigabit Ethernet network cards provides maximum throughput in the most demanding environments
  
• Ease of use – The CyberGuard software is very straightforward to configure. The inclusion of all software as Ghost images on a bootable CD ROM and the ability to create individual “personality files” on floppy disk, makes it one of the most straightforward firewalls to deploy today.

“Whenever a company connects its network to the Internet, it confronts numerous dilemmas regarding security,” states Bob Walder, Director of The NSS Group and author of the white paper supporting the STARLord test. “Firewalls have become something of a commodity item, so it takes something special for one to achieve our Gold Award.”

“We have always been impressed with the CyberGuard firewall software, but now it has been bundled with a high-end network appliance that will be at home in the largest corporate, ISP or ASP environment, we believe that the STARLord product is something special, and is worthy of the Gold Award”.

The CyberGuard STARLord White Paper is available for free download from Product Testing section of The NSS Group Web site at http://www.nss.co.uk, from where further details can be found on the NSS Awards.

About The NSS Group

Founded in 1991,The NSS Group is Europe’s foremost independent network testing facility and consultancy organisation.� Our Head Office is based in Bedfordshire in the UK.� Further offices offer fully equipped testing labs and seminar centres in the south of France and Cambridge, UK.

The NSS Group offers a range of specialist IT and Networking services to vendors and end-user organisations throughout Europe and the United States.� The Group’s core range of services focus on the following:-

Independent Test Labs
Network Security
Network Consultancy
Technical Writing
Media Events

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