CAMPBELL, Calif., Dec. 18, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ForeScout Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of pervasive network security solutions for Global 2000 enterprises and government organizations, today announced that its first ever customer innovation award - The Network Security Game Changer - was presented to Nick Duda, principal information security engineer at Vistaprint. In its inaugural year, ForeScout established this award to recognize, honor and celebrate customers that are achieving outstanding success with ForeScout solutions and broadly advancing the IT security community.

The selection committee singled out Duda for his creative thinking and out-of-the-box problem solving, the effectiveness and scale of his CounterACT™ implementation and his overall contribution to the entire ForeScout community.

Going beyond a standard implementation, Duda is leveraging the power and flexibility of the CounterACT platform to tackle IT, inventory and help desk issues. Using the ControlFabric Interface, Duda has integrated CounterACT with Vistaprint's anti-virus management server, its SIEM and its financial budgeting system while also creating simple Cacti monitoring templates to leverage CounterACT's simple network management protocol (SNMP) capabilities for tracking utilization of this critical component of Vistaprint's infrastructure. The results include reduced overall risk for Vistaprint and hundreds of saved man-hours of critical IT resources, freeing the IT team to focus on strategic issues.

Duda has earned the position of "Guru" in the ForeScout community with many top ranked or liked posts, answers and feature requests, and he is a frequent and top rated speaker at community events, including the ForeScout Best Practices Seminars. He has made worthy enhancement requests and bug finds, leveraged numerous CounterACT plugins and shared his custom policies with other ForeScout customers - demonstrating his commitment to the IT and security community. Duda also recently won the prestigious Information Security magazine Security 7 Award in the retail category for his innovative approach to network security.

"It is an honor to be named the first ForeScout Network Security Game Changer. I've been with Vistaprint for more than a decade securing our network.  Giving back to the security community has become a passion of mine," said Duda. "The ForeScout CounterACT platform is so versatile and robust that it provides endless new ways to innovate and automate Vistaprint's network security hub. In fact, I have even more CounterACT uses, integrations and automations planned in 2014. I look forward to continuing to share my experiences with the ForeScout community and, hopefully, inspire other customers to expand the scope of their installations as well."

In making the award selection, the ForeScout judges noted that one key to Duda's success was his vision and implementation of a network security hub that automated repetitive tasks like device discovery, host compliance status, endpoint remediation and network access control functionality. The design leverages data collected from endpoint profiling (discovering a device and identifying its operating system) and security posturing for increased situational awareness, which allows greater automation of routine tasks, freeing the IT team for higher priority tasks while strengthening the company's overall security posture.

"We are recognizing Nick for his admirable achievements in network security and the unique and exciting ways he is using ForeScout CounterACT," said John Thompson, director of customer and product advocacy at ForeScout. "When Nick presents at the ForeScout Best Practices Seminars, attendees always comment that he has inspired them with additional ROI and use cases for their own ForeScout CounterACT deployments. Everyone within the ForeScout and user communities is impressed by his ingenuity. Nick is a true game changer, and he drives us to continue innovating, as well as to expand and improve the scope of our product offerings."

Vistaprint empowers more than 13 million micro businesses and consumers annually with affordable, professional options to make an impression. The company employs over 4,500 people, operates more than 25 localized websites globally and ships to more than 130 countries. The company's network consists of over 15,000 endpoints, including servers, desktops, laptops and personal devices.

The Network Security Game Changer award is voted on by a committee headed by Thompson. Each year, a ForeScout customer who proves themself as an industry leader and demonstrates an evident commitment to creatively and securely protecting his/her company network will be chosen as an honoree.

ForeScout is positioned in the "Leaders" quadrant in the Gartner Inc. 2013 Magic Quadrant for Network Access Control, and Frost & Sullivan has acclaimed the company as the largest independent NAC vendor and one that is growing the fastest in the market. To learn more about the Customer Innovator Award, please visit http://www.forescout.com/duda-award/.

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About ForeScout Technologies, Inc.
ForeScout delivers pervasive network security by allowing organizations to continuously monitor and mitigate security exposures and cyberattacks. The company's CounterACT platform dynamically identifies and assesses all network users, endpoints and applications to provide complete visibility, intelligence and policy-based mitigation of security issues. ForeScout's open ControlFabric technology allows a broad range of IT security products and management systems to share information and automate remediation actions. Because ForeScout's solutions are easy to deploy, unobtrusive, flexible and scalable, they have been chosen by more than 1,500 enterprises and government agencies. Headquartered in Campbell, California, ForeScout offers its solutions through its network of authorized partners worldwide. Learn more at: www.forescout.com.

ForeScout Technologies, Inc. is a privately held Delaware corporation. ForeScout, the ForeScout logo and CounterACT™ are trademarks of ForeScout. Other names mentioned may be trademarks of their respective owners.