Obsidian Untangles SMBs’ security environments with new suite

Obsidian Systems has announced the local availability of Untangle, a commercial-grade open source security solution that’s perfect for small and medium sized businesses wanting to block spam, spyware, viruses, adware and unwanted content from entering their network, and enable secure remote access for those users that need it.

Besides the clear benefits Untangle’s superior functionality offers, Muggie van Staden, managing director of Obsidian says it’s a compelling option for most organisations, since it not only runs on Windows, Linux and as a bare-metal install, that the 12 applications which form the core of the solution are both free and open source.

“Each one of these open source solutions is available as a stand-alone product,” he explains, “and IT shops are strongly moving away from implementing various point solutions, towards fully-integrated solutions that offer the combined functionality of numerous products.

“The 12 applications available using Untangle are all pre-integrated and ready to go out of the box”

“Furthermore, Untangle’s multi-platform strategy not only means that the solution has the ability to integrate with virtually every IT environment in play today, but that it can begin offering value from the word go while being cost effective to implement,” he enthuses.

To further extend the solution’s viability and value, van Staden says a number of third-party developers have built commercial add-ons for Untangle.

“These add-ons allow Untangle to amongst other things draw on live support engineers when issues arise, integrate the solution tightly with Microsoft’s Active Directory, build and implement automatically enforceable security policies, customise the GUI’s look and feel; and extend its web and virus filtering capabilities substantially,” he says.

Van Staden says that Obsidian has already successfully rolled the solution out to a select number of early adopters and customer satisfaction on both technical superiority and ease of use are both very high.

“Since moving across to Untangle the spam at FreightLink has decrease substantially,” says Tracey Staples from FreightLink. “The quarantine function is fantastic to monitor suspicious mail. Staff can also remotely access email easily and this has increased productivity as people are able to work anytime, anywhere.” Tracey says she also no longer have concerns that data may be lost or corrupt.

With comments such as these, van Staden says his company is extremely confident about Untangle’s viability locally. “We’re extremely proud to be an Untangle partner and believe our expertise in free and open source software positions us strongly to be a player of choice in this realm,” he says.

“With this solution on board, we look forward to greatly simplifying the lives of many of our customers while improving their security posture over the coming years,” he concludes.