Juniper Networks Inc. announced that Las Últimas Noticias newspaper, a property of Chile's largest news consortium, El Mercurio News Corporation (El Mercurio S.A.P.), has selected Juniper Networks' Integrated Security Gateway (ISG) 2000 integrated firewall/IPSec VPN for protection against Worms, Trojans, Viruses and other malware. By utilizing the Juniper ISG 2000, El Mercurio can not only make the company's website more secure, but can also dramatically increase overall reliability and network uptime to this high-traffic website.

"With Juniper Networks' ISG 2000, I can rest at ease and go home without worrying about finding something wrong the next day," said Luis Alberto Soto, networking department manager at El Mercurio, "I am completely confident that the Juniper ISG 2000 can process the large volumes of traffic traversing our network while securing it against malicious attacks."

El Mercurio S.A.P. owns 15 newspapers, as well as their corresponding websites. In March 2006, one of those newspapers, Las Últimas Noticias, implemented the news website www.lun.com in order to provide a better user experience. As a result, daily page views jumped to five million a day. This dramatic increase in page views resulted in bandwidth usage greater than 1 GB, putting a significant traffic load on the system and forcing the networking department to rethink its security system. The company tested many security solutions, most of which performed below expectations. "Of the many solutions we tested, only Juniper Networks' ISG 2000 integrated solution exceeded expectations. I am particularly impressed with the intrusion detection and prevention characteristics provided by Juniper," said Luis Soto.

This is not the first time that El Mercurio SAP has entrusted its communications and security to Juniper Networks. In 2003, the company successfully tested Juniper Networks' SSL VPN solution. El Mercurio used Juniper Networks Secure Access to provide remote connectivity for their external clients, journalists and other disparate divisions including maintenance, support and sales. The results of the test were duplicated in the real-world deployment of the SSL VPN solution across all of the company's independent units, which continues to be used today.

"The ISG 2000 is a perfect fit for El Mercurio's needs, and we're proud that Chile's largest news corporation trusts Juniper with their network security," said Tim Lambie, vice president, Americas International, Juniper Networks. "Our security solutions continue to protect many of Latin America's most visited Internet sites while delivering industry-leading performance, El Mercurio's among them."

The ISG 2000 is an integrated FW/VPN system with multi-gigabit performance, a modular architecture and virtualization capabilities. The base system allows for up to four I/O modules for interface expansion and is expandable with an optional integrated IDP and GPRS Firewall/VPN. The ISG 2000 provides network-friendly interface flexibility and the reliability required for high-speed network security deployments.