Headquartered in Beijing, China, privately-owned NSFOCUS is bringing its security products to North America. With over 1,000 employees in four countries, the company is looking to become a “legitimate global player,” stated Vann Abernethy, North American product manager for NSFOCUS.
I spoke with Abernethy at ITEXPO West 2011 in Austin earlier this month as the company started its program to work with U.S. channel partners. NSFOCUS is leading the effort with its DDoS appliance, a product currently running at large installations such as China Unicom (News 
- Alert) and QQ.com, the latter with over 850 million registered users and processing at speeds of 240 Gbps in a cluster. An individual box can run up to 10 Gbps at inline speeds.
“When we looked at the North American market, the IPS market was crowded,” Abernethy said. “Gartner (News - Alert) reported DDoS was becoming the real threat, it's something you can't throw ACLs and bandwidth at…We're going after MSPs, ISPs, cloud providers and telcos, anyone who offers additional services to end-customers, we're partnering with them to offer DDoS, letting them offer services to their clients.”
DDoS attacks are getting more “vicious,” Abernethy stated, with attacks escalating from 10 Gbps moving up to 100 Gbps in intensity.
In business since 2003, NSFOCUS started its move out of the Chinese mainline about 3 to 4 years ago, slowly building up trust in Asia and securing customers in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and expanding to Taiwan.
“We're not a box salesman,” Abernethy said, but companies can just buy and install the appliance directly if they like. “We're looking to go to the folks that provide some level of services to help them further protect their customer. It's a revenue sharing model, so it's OpEx rather than CapEx. You don't have to have $500,000 upfront to buy a box. Providers will be able to offer remote cleaning. We're making it very simple for our partners, we're going to be very easy to work with.”
And what about the 800 pound panda in the room?
“The main thing we run into is the China question,” Abernethy said. “We'll give you a box to test, to do whatever you have to do.” The company is working with several security firms, including NSS Labs, to provide independent security testing of its appliance using a wide range of techniques. Vericode will be conducting applications security testing on NSFOCUS' product, performing both static and dynamic testing.
Doug Mohney is a contributing editor for TMCnet and a 20-year veteran of the ICT space. To read more of his articles, please visit columnist page.
Edited by Jennifer Russell
