Proventia Network Intrusion Prevention System (IPS): Product Reviews

NSS Labs
NSS Gold Award
April 2009

NSS Labs has awarded the IBM Proventia Network Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) GX6116 appliance the highly coveted "Gold" Award, the first of its kind of five years.

NSS Labs tested the product with over 1,500 individual evaluations in its real-world test lab to evaluate its security effectiveness and performance, as well as its management and usability capabilities.

"Not only did the GX6116 pass our rigorous certification requirements, but it also demonstrated an average security effectiveness of 98.6% over a 3 month period," said Rick Moy, President of NSS Labs. "Each monthly test added fresh exploits to ensure the product was capable of stopping current attacks, a key requirement of security professionals."

In order to achieve Gold, a product must consistently block more than 95% of the exploits in the Security Update Monitor (SUM) program, a recurring monthly test of security effectiveness.

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Gartner
February 2008

IBM positioned in Leaders Quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Network Intrusion Prevention System Appliances, 1H08

SC Magazine Four out of Five Stars
SC Magazine Proventia IPS GX6116 Product Review
August 2007

"The Proventia IPS GX6116 could be considered the high-end sports car of IPS appliances."
"Not only does this device include several protection and analysis features — such as protocol analysis for more than 140 different network and application protocols, heuristics and pattern matching — but it is built for speed. This device includes a high-end network processing unit, as well as eight 64-bit multi-core processors, and dual XEON x86 processors examine traffic across all seven OSI layers. This beast of a box can handle almost any amount of traffic thrown its way and still have resources to spare."

NSS IPS + Enterprise 2006 Award
NSS Approved IPS + Enterprise 2006 Award (PDF)
August 2006

"The GX5108 was the first in the industry to receive the IPS + Enterprise certification"
"Performance at all levels of our load tests was impeccable, with 100 per cent of all attacks being detected and blocked under the most extreme load conditions. We would have no hesitation in rating the Proventia GX5108 as a true 1Gbps device as claimed by ISS."

"Security effectiveness was impressive, with excellent coverage for the most critical vulnerabilities, and extremely strong resistance to typical evasion techniques."

"All in all, the Proventia continues to be one of the most consistently accurate IDS/IPS systems we have tested."

NSS IPS + Branch Office 2006 Award
NSS Approved IPS + Branch Office 2006 Award (PDF)
June 2006

**The GX4004 was the first in the industry to receive the IPS + Branch Office certification**
"The Proventia GX4004 offers outstanding performance coupled with extremely low latency under all traffic conditions, and latency is virtually unaffected no matter how much background traffic is passing through the device."

"SiteProtector continues to improve with each version, and the alert-handling capabilities make it one of the better centralised security management consoles we have seen in our labs."

"Due to the high levels of performance and security effectiveness, coupled with the excellent centralised management capabilities, the Proventia GX4004 has been awarded NSS Approved at the IPS + Branch Office level."