April 18, 2023

Putting Glasswall CDR (Content Disarm and Reconstruction) to the test

Since the dawn of cyber-security, security teams have faced a trade-off when deciding on which security solutions best match their requirements. Many are commonly faced with a decision to either sacrifice usability and speed in search of better protection or to sacrifice security competency in the pursuit of a more usable and faster solution.

With protection of critical IT infrastructure being the goal of most security teams, many opt to sacrifice speed and usability to achieve the best level of protection possible.

However, this approach also brings some significant limitations, particularly around the identification and mitigation of file-based security threats. For instance, traditional file protection solutions alone are incapable of providing protection against zero-day and complex file-based threats. In fact, Glasswall discovered that these detection-based solutions, such as antivirus and sandbox technologies, can leave organizations unprotected against zero-day threats for up to 18 days.

So, despite sacrificing speed and usability, security teams have still been deploying file protection solutions which remain incapable of providing adequate security when deployed alone.

Glasswall CDR – protection without compromise

Gartner ranks CDR as the best solution to protect against file-based threats. As the market-leading CDR technology , Glasswall CDR balances the scales, offering zero-trust protection for known and unknown threats that’s lightning quick, easy to use and easy to deploy.

The Glasswall Halo is a flexible cloud-native CDR solution built on a massively scalable Kubernetes-based architecture that harnesses the power of our Embedded Engine to provide out-the-box industry-leading file protection for security teams.

We have recently launched version 2.0 of our Glasswall Halo, and to highlight why we believe Glasswall CDR is the best file protection solution available on the market, we put it to the test.

Glasswall Halo v2 Performance Test Findings:

File configuration:

20 business files ranging from 17 MB to 0.05 MB in size

File types include: PowerPoint, Video, Excel, Word, Image, PDF, Audio

Median file size = 0.64 MB

Technical assumptions:

5 Engines per node
8 virtual cores
28 GB Memory
Request concurrency to availability of resource is 1:1

Test results:

Small print:

Throughput may vary dramatically based on the size and complexity of each file.
We have opted for conservative metrics by assuming that the median file size is less than one 1 MB.
Infrastructure constraints such as storage I/O speeds may impact observed speed.
A concentration of larger media files may lead to significantly higher throughput.
Real throughput will always be constrained by the licence entitlements purchased.
A higher request concurrency to available CDR resources will lead to higher throughputs of files but may result in lower processing times per file.

What this means for you and your security team:

Glasswall Halo can secure files against zero-day threats and complex risks at rapid speed and massive scale.

With an average file processing time of just 815 milliseconds, and five workload nodes processing 4.4 million files per day (or 2.7 million mbs of data), organizations who harness the power of Glasswall Halo no longer face a security trade-off.

Instead, they get access to an out-the-box solution that provides safe, usable files at lightning speed with no impact on end user productivity.

To find out how Glasswall CDR works <click here>.

<Discover how Glasswall CDR can be utilized within your organization>.

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