Verizon is stepping up its global managed security services by extending the reach of its denial-of-service (DOS) Defense Mitigation service to 11 European countries and offering a new secure gateway network-based firewall that allows customers to provide security for both private networks and secure tunnels through the Internet. The two new announcements are being made at this week’s RSA Conference, being held in San Francisco.

The two announcements are part of an effort at Verizon Business to provide a holistic approach to security that enables customers to protect against operational risks and risks to a business’ brand and reputation, said Cindy Bellefeuille, director of security solutions for Verizon Business. In general, she said, managed security services are becoming much more important to service providers and their customers because the threats are mounting. No longer are customers just worried about sophisticated hackers.

“We are seeing a proliferation of threats--there is less skill needed today to do a lot of damage,” Bellefeuille said. “Our goal is to provide pervasive security to our clients, in the [network] cloud and on the premises.”

Being pervasive means securing each layer of the network and the IT infrastructure as well, she said. “We are helping them apply the appropriate amount of security throughout their operation.”

DOS attacks, in particular, are on the rise, Bellefeuille said, as ‘bot” networks assembled by attacking thousands of PCs to generate traffic that can overwhelm a Web site or network resource. As part of the effort to combat DOS attacks, Verizon Business DDOS service will now be available to customers in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.

The Secure Gateway product is one that multi-national customers have sought, said Mike Marcellin, executive director of IT and Ethernet Networking. Verizon Business' Secure Gateway-Firewall gives enterprises a single Web-based graphic user interface that they can use to set up internal policies and control both inbound and outbound traffic, and the Internet traffic they allow onto their network. It enables a business to securely connect remote sites that don’t have dedicated private faculties.

“This is really an offering targeted at private network customers, but it leverages interoperability with the network,” he said. “We can extend the reach, at an attractive price, of secure gateway services to their traffic that comes in on private tunnels through public Internet infrastructure.”

The network-based firewall enables multi-national companies to “consolidate and centralize their security profile across their network,” to include providing Internet access to those on their intranet and communication with extranet partners securely, Marcellin said.

“They can give their intranet users access to the Internet, they can extend to extranet partners where various applications be and securely control who can come back onto their private network,” he said. “We have had it in the market for more than a year. Until now, we had a controlled set of templates, and we would have to manage all those policies and rules for a customer. We can still do that, but we also will give that control over to the customer to control their own policies and rule sets. It provides an easy single point of control.”