Sentinel Outpost 4.6: New Platform, New Features, and Expanded Visibility for You

Please Note: If your Sentinel isn’t running 4.6 yet, don’t worry. We’re slowly but surely making our way through all our customers’ external IPS devices, updating the software, and in some cases, hardware. If you haven’t heard from us yet, you will soon. Of course if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us any time.

Earlier this year in April, we officially released Sentinel Outpost 4.6. It has a bunch of exciting new features and is rebuilt from the ground up to perform better and faster than ever before, including a new, high-performance Active Threat Intelligence Platform, cool visibility tools, enhanced reporting, and more power under the hood.

Here’s a brief rundown.

More Secure

One of Sentinel’s greatest assets is our CINS Active Threat Intelligence, through which we gather and analyze threat data from InfoSec sources and our network of devices worldwide. In 4.6, we’ve given you a window into that world, so you can see the specific feeds we’re pulling. With this ongoing access to near real-time threat insight, you can customize your own threat lists, and configure your devices to only block the IP addresses you want to block.

Now, if you’re one of the many customers who prefers to take the “set it and forget it” approach to Sentinel, don’t worry. Our support team will still automatically, proactively, block the big, known threats on your devices, just like we do now. But, for those of you who want to look through the intelligence data, or be a little more hands-on with what you choose to block or allow, you now have that option.

Also, in response to customer requests, we’ve added geo-filtering to all of our devices, so you can block IPs by country of origin. There were many opinions internally on adding this one, but the customer demand was too high to ignore, so there it is. 🙂

Better Visibility

The Sentinel’s web interface has been revamped with a focus on efficiency and visibility.

First, let’s talk about the updated dashboard. Now, it’s a quick view of both actionable alerts and threat intelligence data, so you’re always up-to-speed on what’s going on. If you’re a drill-down kind of person, you can filter for more granular detail and see every network the Sentinel is blocking. We’ve added more filtering options and a couple of new features with a lot more detail.

We’ve also dramatically upgraded our reports to make them not only look better, but include more threat intelligence and geo-based information. There’s also a brand-new Executive Summary Report—something that a lot of our customers have asked for. This report summarizes everything that Sentinel has done to protect your network in an attractive, well-laid-out document, with charts, graphs and other design elements. It’s designed to be printed out and handed to your auditors, CEO, boss, or compliance officer.

We’ve also modernized our emailing reporting, which actually might be the one thing our customers will notice first.

More Powerful

We already have one of the best security teams in the industry monitoring threats, and proactively protecting our customers’ networks around-the-clock. By upgrading, rebuilding and enhancing our existing platform, we put more powerful tools in their toolbox to keep you safe, and do it faster and more efficiently than ever before.

For example, our new state-of-the-art inspection engine and alert processing enable the Sentinel to analyze and drop malicious traffic more quickly, and flexible, new configuration tools like Alert Only Networks enable them to offer more granular, customized configurations to individual clients, tailored to their specific needs.

Just as important, our new platform positions Sentinel to be more agile, so we can release future updates much more rapidly, multiple times a year. More power, performance and muscle, all working on your behalf.

What Hasn’t Changed: Our People, Our Service, and Our Commitment to You

Sentinel Outpost 4.6 is one of the biggest upgrades in recent memory. As excited as we are about these changes, we’re equally committed to making sure some things don’t change: the ease, affordability and effectiveness of our devices, and the unsurpassed support you get from our team of security experts who are still available whenever you need them, 24 hours-a-day.

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