Check Point boss snipes at Microsoft's security

Check Point's chief executive has taken a swing at rival Microsoft, saying its security products leave a lot to be desired.

Gil Shwed, also founder of the firewall vendor, made his remarks during a lecture on the global security market, before a group of network security managers at an IDC security conference in Israel.

"Microsoft has been in the security market for more than ten years. It has firewall, VPN, anti-virus capabilities and disk encryption," Shwed said. "But it doesn't have the leading products in any of them, and apparently, the management and integration levels of its products is unsatisfactory."

For a decade, Microsoft has been offering an enterprise firewall, the ISA server, but Check Point for one hasn't been running into them in the field, Shwed said.

He went on to criticise Microsoft's security products more specifically. Since Microsoft began setting its Windows Firewall as the default in Windows XP, Check Point has built a $50-million-a-year business in personal firewalls alone.

And that, said Shwed, means that Microsoft's personal Windows firewall can't be doing the job that users want, if the Israeli company's personal firewall business remained healthy.

He refrained from mentioning other rivals like Cisco and Juniper. But he did say that security managers at major enterprises don't want to delve into the nuts and bolts of the security systems and components under offer. What they really want is a certificate guaranteeing that the security systems and components meet the regulations.

They want to know their systems will be safe. They care less how that's achieved.

Most companies use multiple security systems, each protecting a different aspect of the enterprise systems. That is not good, Shwed elaborated the obvious: what they need is a single platform that will do, or manage, it all for them. And to no great surprise, he said that Check Point was close to providing such a platform.