Security vendor Fortinet has upgraded its multi-threat security appliances targeted at enterprise branch offices’ and retail outlets' wired and wireless networks.

The FortiGate-60B and its wireless-oriented brother, the FortiWifi-60B, could tempt firms concerned about PCI compliance and the risk of data loss. Fortinet's UK and Ireland security engineer spokesman, Jose Grandmougin, said, "The PCI standards call for a proper intrusion prevention system (IPS), we're seeing lots of demand from firms wishing to be PCI DSS compliant. The FortiGate OS is an accredited system and is standardised across all of our appliances, from branch office to datacentre systems."

Fortinet said that branch offices are more vulnerable than firms' central sites because of a lack of IT security personnel and, quite often, the hardware required to cope with the latest threats to VoIP or web-based applications.

"The 60B models replace existing models and have more memory and better CPU, " explained Grandmougin. "We've added a 3G PC Card interface so that users can add mobile broadband connectivity, for example, from Vodafone or 3. We see a worldwide trend towards mobile connectivity rather than digging a hole in the road to put wired infrastructure in."

Both appliances use FortiASIC, Fortinet's application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), for better performance, especially when higher network layer features are enabled, such as web content filtering.

Besides the PC-Card slot for 3G cards, the appliances have dual WAN interfaces, six LAN connections, an analogue modem and a de-militiarised zone (DMZ) interface for segregating trusted and untrusted users. There are also two USB ports on the appliances for system configuration management.

Fortinet touts the appliances as multi-threat security appliances or unified threat management devices if all the features are enabled. The 60B appliances have individually deployable firewall, antivirus, virtual private network (VPN), intrusion prevention (IPS), anti-spam, web content filtering and traffic shaping, all of which are kept up to date by Fortinet's FortiGuard subscription services.

Both the FortiGate-60B and FortiWifi-60B are available now from Fortinet’s channel partners costing £445 + VAT and £637 + VAT respectively.