The Island team has released the latest version of its Island firmware: Version 4.1. The new update introduces two new major capabilities to its series of routers and firewalls:Â OceanView, a big-board monitoring tool for managing multiple Islands, and Cross Connect, a patent-pending approach to secure device communications across network segments that includes multicasting.
The 4.1 release is available immediately across the full product lineup—including the upcoming Island Pro Mini—via the web and mobile app. The new firmware also adds roughly three dozen additional fixes and enhancements, including PPPoE support.
Island OceanView
According to the Island team, OceanView was built around businesses and individuals managing many Island devices at once. The new feature delivers a single, real-time dashboard indicating network health, device activity, and security status across an entire fleet of Islands.
Columns can be customized to streamline the view; Islands are sortable by model, group, or status. Hovering over an alert displays message context to help determine further action.
“Integrators have been asking for this, and we listened,” said Tom Gallo, Island’s Chief Revenue Officer. “The team has built something elegant here—a way to spot issues as they occur and resolve before the customer is affected.”
Cross Connect
In addition to multicasting, Cross Connect adds new method for letting named devices or device groups initiate communication with other named devices or groups across LAN and VLAN boundaries. For example, a group of cameras may need to talk to a network video recorder on a different LAN, or a SONOS controller may need to talk to speakers on a separate VLAN.
Why integrators should take note
According to the Island team there are two factors set this implementation apart from similar features in the industry:
- Only named devices can connect, meaning everything else on the segments stays isolated, preserving the protection that network segmentation is meant to provide in the first place.
- Cross Connect is configured by device or group names rather than IP addresses and Island takes care of all routing, avoiding the complex setups typical of other firewalls.
