WatchGuard Technologies announced that Network Products Guide, industry's leading technology research and advisory guide, named the WatchGuard XTM 8 Series a winner of the 7th Annual 2012 Hot Companies and Best Products Awards in the Security Hardware category. These industry and peer recognitions from Network Products Guide are the world's premier information technology awards honoring achievements and recognitions in every facet of the IT industry.

"This award is another testament to the value that WatchGuard brings to our customers and channel partners," said Eric Aarrestad, Vice President of Marketing at WatchGuard Technologies. "The WatchGuard XTM 8 Series provides state of the art multifunction network security - ideal for mid-market and enterprise organizations."

WatchGuard XTM 8 Series - Virtualized Extensible Threat ManagementBuilt for speed, the WatchGuard XTM 8 Series delivers 5Gbps firewall throughput, making it ideal for demanding networks of 1,000 or more users. With full security features activated, the XTM 8 Series achieves a faster-than-line-speed 1.2Gbps throughput, which represents a major leap forward for unified threat management appliances in delivering high security without compromising network performance.

Leveraging WatchGuard's "defense-in-depth" firewall technology, which includes stateful packet inspection, deep packet inspection and WatchGuard's proprietary proxy technology, the XTM 8 Series embodies the latest security technologies to protect business networks. With its built in application proxies, the WatchGuard XTM 8 Series natively stops a myriad of blended threats, fragmented and malformed packet attacks, spyware, malware, denial of service and many other types of threats and attacks.

The WatchGuard XTM 8 Series takes full advantage of the highly sophisticated WatchGuard operating system, Fireware XTM, which defends networks by utilizing innovative security features, including WatchGuard's cloud-based Reputation Enabled Defense security service, Application Control, full HTTPS inspection, VoIP security, and IM and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) application blocking. With Fireware XTM, the WatchGuard XTM 8 Series integrates advanced networking capabilities, including clustering, load-balancing and other enterprise-class networking features. Additionally, the XTM 8 Series extends management capabilities by providing role-based access control (RBAC), centralized multi-box management and enhanced reporting functions.