To address increasing traffic diversity and the growing security demands placed on enterprise networks, Cisco has broadened its portfolio of intrusion prevention systems by announcing the availability of Cisco IPS 4270.

The Cisco IPS 4270 claims to provide greater throughput without compromising pinpoint traffic inspection. The IPS 4270 offers up to 4-Gbps performance for media-intensive environments that feature Web-based content and video. For networks with heavy transaction-based traffic, such as e-commerce, point-of-sale, instant messaging, and voice over IP, the new appliance provides up to 2 Gbps of throughput.

Because datacentres are naturally complex, the IPS 4270 appliance is designed to be both flexible and virtualisation-friendly. The appliance enables IT organisations to "virtualise" both inspection and policy information, allowing intrusion prevention services to be woven into the overall datacentre system.

"Cisco has made a conscientious effort to design a flexible, powerful and virtualization-friendly IPS device that meets the critical needs of high-traffic environments," said Mick Scully, vice president of product management for Cisco's Security Technology Group. "The IPS 4270 marks a new chapter in both Cisco and the security industry's evolution toward making intrusion prevention and traffic inspection supportive of networks that feature everything from collaborative Web 2.0 applications to continuous high-density transactions. Simply put, the IPS 4270 has the performance to address today's real-world enterprise and datacentre requirements."