How It Works

Physical Placement

The physical placement of Irongate within your network structure is not relevant to it's functionality. Irongate can be placed in any convenient location that has access to a network cable and a power cord.

Network Accessibility

Irongate is assigned a static IP address congruent with your network's TCP/IP addressing scheme. This includes information such as DNS servers, Exchange Server, and a default gateway. Once this is accomplished, Irongate is accessible from anywhere within your network. This means all desktops, servers, and laptops can take full advantage of the protection Irongate has to offer. Clients can locate Irongate either by it's assigned IP address, or by using an internal hostname configured on your DNS server. The latter is the preferred method, since it eliminates client reconfiguration in case you ever change Irongate's IP address in the future.

Web Protection

Irongate is an intelligent Antivirus Proxy. As such, clients are configured to use Irongate as a standard proxy server. This can be done centrally if using a standard Windows 2000 or 2003 Domain Environment with Active Directory. All that is required is to modify the Group Policy settings for your Organizational Units (OU's) within your domain, and all clients inherit the proxy settings automatically. For smaller networks lacking a Windows Domain Environment, it is a simple as configuring the proxy settings for your browser of choice (ie: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, etc).

Email Protection

Irongate is an effective email firewall, protecting all computers on your network as well as your Exchange Server. Client computers are shielded from all viruses and spyware-infected emails. The Microsoft Exchange server is protected not only from viruses, but also from Denial of Service exploits used by hackers and worms.

Irongate requires that emails arrive in the form of externally-initiated SMTP connections, as opposed to internally-initiated POP3 connections. All but the smallest networks utilize this type of email connection, but consult your network administrator is you are unsure.

The only configuration required is that your Internet router forward incoming SMTP connections (TCP port 25) to Irongate instead of Exchange. Irongate then filters and processes incoming emails accordingly, and forwards only clean emails to the internal Exchange Server.

Spam Protection

Irongate has the ability to intelligently filter incoming emails for spam at the same time it scans for viruses. No external spam lists or databases are used to determine which emails are regarded as spam. Instead, Irongate stores a knowledgebase of unique spam patterns for each user on the network. This means users must continually train Irongate - which is done with simple Outlook drag-n-drop integration. When a spam reaches a user's inbox, the user simply drags the spam message to a folder designated for Irongate. This notifies Irongate of the spam message, from which Irongate will analyze and update it's knowledgebase for that user, dynamically increasing accuracy. This provides the highest possible accuracy and keeps up with changing spam trends.

Irongate places blocked spam on internal quarantines contained within Irongate. There is a quarantine for each user, keeping spam messages conveniently segregated for review. Normally, users do not visit their spam quarantines unless they believe a legitimate email was blocked by mistake. In this case, the users simply opens their favorite web browser and points it to Irongate (either by IP address or hostname). Irongate proceeds to pull up the quarantine homepage, from which the user selects their quarantine from the list to view their spam messages.

The user may sort emails by date, subject, sender, etc. In addition, messages with select keywords can be highlighed for quick scrolling. If a legitimate email is found in the quarantine, the user simply selects it and tells Irongate to deliver the message. Irongate not only delivers the original email to the user's inbox within seconds, but also updates it's knowledgebase to dynamically learn from it's mistake, providing the highest accuracy possible.