Todd Kap, Network Engineer

It's one thing to protect onsite corporate computers from intruders - company firewalls and secured internal networks help to keep valuable corporate data safe. However, it's quite another matter to keep confidential information safe on a company laptop when employees need to log on from various unsecured locations such as airport lounges or hotel bedrooms.

Situations that seem benign may have hidden dangers. For example, telecommuters need to work from home on machines that may be shared by other family members; business travelers use laptops from the road, sometimes logging onto corporate systems from machines that may be connected to unsecured networks. Because they are outside the corporate firewall, all these machines are potential targets for attacks by hackers who want to infiltrate Novell's corporate network. The challenge is to provide the security of an internal firewall to systems outside the office walls - a challenge that ZoneAlarmŽ helped Novell to meet and overcome.

At Novell, a leading provider of eBusiness solutions and Net services software, the responsibility of securing the network falls on Todd Kap. He's a network security engineer for Novell and keeping the company's intellectual property safe is Kap's primary concern. Recently, he focused on how to best protect machines that had access to the company's core data and were outside Novell's secure corporate network. "We have traveling users, home users, and wireless users and all these users have Novell's intellectual property on their machines," Kap recalls. "Because they are outside the corporate firewall, these machines are vulnerable to attacks. Several home users' machines already had been compromised, which prompted us to evaluate personal firewall software that we could make available on a corporate level."

Kap evaluated ZoneAlarmŽ Pro for the personal firewall solution to protect offsite Novell machines from Internet-borne threats. "The option to use a hardware solution was considered," notes Kap. "However, it was too costly to implement on a large scale. We evaluated several personal firewall software packages and chose ZoneAlarmŽ Pro because of the simple user interface, the ability to lock down programs as well as ports, and the ability to roll out a corporate standard configuration on all machines that could automatically update their configuration from a central source."

ZoneAlarmŽ Pro is now installed on 1,000 machines used by Novell employees outside the corporate firewall.

"ZoneAlarmŽ has brought us definite peace of mind when it comes to our corporate intellectual property on previously unsecured machines," said Kap. "We no longer fear these machines will be compromised and our data will fall into the wrong hands. Our goal was to protect our information and ZoneAlarmŽ has helped us to accomplish that goal."

With offices in 55 countries, a daily challenge facing EDS, a leader in global Information solutions, is protecting employee PCs from the hazards of the Internet. EDS must allow offsite employee access to the corporate network while protecting the technology environment. The solution? EDS determined that ZoneAlarmŽ Pro is the most effective choice as the personal firewall standard for all employee workstations that remotely access the corporate network. ZoneAlarmŽ Pro offers protection of EDS's remote workstations -- complementing anti-virus software by providing immediate defense against both known and unknown threats, managing security down to the remote workstation level, and retrieving intrusion alerts easily and effectively.