Verizon is stepping up its global managed security services by extending the reach of its denial of service, or 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 public Internet. The two new announcements are being made at this week's RSA Conference in San Francisco.

In general, managed security services are becoming much more important to service providers and their customers because the threats are mounting, said Cindy Bellefeuille, director of security solutions for Verizon Business. 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.

DOS attacks in particular are on the rise, Bellefeuille said, as “bots” assemble networks 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, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.

The Secure Gateway product is one that multinational customers have sought, said Mike Marcellin, Verizon's executive director of IT and Ethernet networking.

“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 through private tunnels through public Internet infrastructure.”

Secure Gateway also enables a network-based firewall, so multinational companies can “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.

Among other RSA announcements, Arbor Networks is launching its Atlas public portal to deliver intelligence and analysis of network security threats on a global basis. The portal also offers a threat index and vulnerability risk index, and the information is culled from darknet sensors that Arbor has deployed throughout many service provider networks.

Meanwhile, Alcatel-Lucent recently developed the mother of all laptop security clients. The Evros data card has a 3G radio, a GPS receiver, a registration key and media access controller that controls access to all data on an enterprise user's laptop.