To offer more flexibility and handle rapid proliferation of encrypted web traffic, WatchGuard have announced hardware upgrades to its Firebox M Series, which helps small and midsize businesses keep up with the “rising tide of encrypted traffic”.

The new appliances allow users to inspect encrypted traffic through industry-leading performance, with all security services enabled.

The updated Firebox M370 performs full HTTTPS inspection 94% faster than competing solutions according to Miercom.

A Ponemon study found that 41% of attacks in 2016 used encryption to disguise the network entry when connecting to a Command and Control server, and 75% of traffic will be encrypted by 2019.

Brendan Patterson, director of product management at WatchGuard, said, “As adoption rates for encryption continue to climb, organisations need to know that their unified threat management offers performance levels that can process the growing torrent of encrypted traffic and the security services capable of detecting threats that might be lurking within that traffic.

“With the new M Series, we offer dramatic improvements in throughput to ensure our customers don’t have to choose between performance and security.”

Robert Smithers, CEO at Miercom, added: “Based on the results of our testing, the WatchGuard Firebox M370 displayed exceptional performance, outperforming its competitors for stateless and stateful traffic throughput scenarios.”

The study also noted: “A firewall that lacks the processing power necessary to inspect high volumes of encrypted traffic would need to turn off some security services or compromise throughput in order to manage the burden.”

Written by Leah Alger