Sophos, Juniper Strike OEM Deal for Branch Office

Sophos and Juniper Networks announced this week that they’re teaming up to extend the spam protection on Juniper’s branch office networking security platforms.

The partnership enables Juniper to integrate Sophos anti-spam technology into Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways, SSG Series Secure Service Gateways and J Series Service Routers for the branch. Sophos’ technology takes proactive, blended approach that eliminates spam based on sender IP information, as well as through advanced heuristics, message and attachment fingerprinting, keyword analysis, and URL detection. Rather than suffering delays while it waits for updates to be distributed, Juniper will leverage Sophos eXtensible List (SXL) real-time updates to have instant access to the most up-to-date anti-spam intelligence gathered by SophosLabs.

The lab analyzes millions of emails and billions of web pages every day in order to inform the automated anti-spam technology about emerging spam campaigns. Its researchers identify around 6,500 new spam-related web pages each day.

“Sophos has built a solid reputation for its dependable and high-performance enterprise security solutions,” Alex Gray, vice president and general manager, Branch Solutions at Juniper Networks, said in a statement. “Sophos anti-spam intelligence will provide our distributed enterprise customers with the highest level of protection and ease of doing business.”

In addition to SXL, Juniper branch office applications will also be equipped with Sophos Behavioral Genotype Protection, a host intrusion prevention system (HIPS) designed to identify and block malicious programs before execution.

This announcement marks one in a series of recent OEM partnering moves by Sophos to extend its reputation and reach beyond simply the client-side antivirus market. Last month the company announced that Intel would integrate Sophos encryption technology in its SOA Expressway to improve security and offer customers a way to meet PCI and HIPAA regulations. And in September, it partnered with HP to start giving away to all new HP Integrity server customers.