StreamShield Networks Cleans-Up The Internet With Revolutionary New Technology
LONDON, September 16, 2004 – StreamShield Networks is launched today as a new company within the Detica Group. StreamShield’s products and technology are a global first, allowing service providers, carriers and mobile operators to offer clean and safe internet services, for both email and real-time internet applications, to their residential and business customers. Threats from viruses, worms, other forms of malware, spam, phishing scams, and offensive content are removed in the internet before the content is safely delivered to subscribers.
According to recent research by MORI, 58% of internet users look to their ISP to stop viruses, spam and offensive content, with 54% willing to pay $3 (?2) or more per month for a clean internet service on top of their standard internet access fees. Additionally, two thirds of internet users said they would switch service provider if an alternative offered such a service.
StreamShield’s Content Security Gateway (CSG) is a network-based hardware product that provides integrated protection at multi-gigabit speeds for email and real-time applications such as web browsing, file sharing and instant messaging. This carrier-class product is optimized for the most demanding network environments through a unique, patent-pending, silicon-based scanning engine called StreamScan.
StreamScan overcomes the performance and scalability limitations of current software and network appliance technologies (which are designed for customer premises rather than deployment in the internet) through a massively parallel silicon architecture that can identify and block multiple threats simultaneously. A single StreamScan engine is designed to scan up to 5,000 emails a second for both viruses and spam (over 400 million emails a day) as well as filter 250,000 web page requests a second – hundreds of times faster than current generation technologies.
StreamShield Networks is born out of advanced high-speed communications research work undertaken within Detica, and the Detica Group continues to fund the business. The company’s management team is led by Founder and CEO Simon Gawne, along with CTO Jon Curnyn. The board is chaired by Tom Black (CEO of Detica Group plc) and includes non-executive director Sir Stephen Lander (who is also chair elect of the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency).
Jose Lopez, Analyst with Frost and Sullivan, comments: “I believe the migration of content security into service providers’ and operators’ networks, so that protection is provided as a managed service to businesses and consumers, is a trend which will fuel the evolution of the market. The barrier to this happening so far has been the availability of technology to do this in real-time, at very high speeds – something which StreamShield Networks is addressing with its new technology.”
“Just as water is cleaned by utility companies and is ready for use straight out of the pipe, so our mission is to make the internet safe, clean and ready for use straight out of the broadband pipe”, comments Simon Gawne, Founder and CEO of StreamShield Networks. “Our unique technology creates major opportunities for service providers and network operators to participate in a market that grew 24.9% last year and is expected to exceed $8.6 billion by 2008(1).”
Tom Black, Chairman of StreamShield Networks adds: “The content security market is one of the most dynamic, fast growing markets in the IT industry today, and the StreamShield proposition brings tremendous benefits to service providers and operators looking to deliver secure, high value services to their customers.”
The company plans to bring its technology to market over the coming months. Its first offering, StreamShield Protector, is also launched today (see announcement that accompanies this release) as a managed service for blocking viruses, spam and inappropriate content in web and email traffic. The company’s content security gateway (CSG) is expected to ship to service providers, carriers and mobile operators in early 2005.