Upgrade your Firewall to UTM!!

Firewalls are a key security requirement for any enterprise today with increased use of internet for business and personal purposes by internal users. Having a traditional firewall technology like Stateful Inspection Firewalls (e.g. Cisco PIX, Checkpoint FW-1) are no more enough with fast change in landscape of Security threats. Today with rise in so many new threats to a network—including viruses, worms, unwanted applications (e.g., P2P, games, instant messaging), phishing, and application-layer attacks enterprise are looking for multi-faced approach to stop these threats.

These above reasons are compelling an enterprise to adopt integrated and unified approach to network security. They want to unify the management of all of these different security and productivity technologies into one unit. This is where UTM comes in. Unified Threat Management Solutions are designed to provide a range of Security Solution in a single appliance reducing costs and simplifying the whole process of security systems management, reporting and installation.

What is a UTM?
Unified threat management (UTM) is a application layer firewall which has many features in one box, including E-mail Spam Filtering, Anti-Virus capability, Intrusion Prevention System, Web Content Filtering, Virtual Private Network support along with the traditional activities of a firewall.

Enterprises have now started adopting UTMs because they have begun to appreciate the benefits of less expenditure and easier centralized administration. Below listed are some of the advantages of deploying Unified Threat Management Solutions
• Provides multi-security in one box (AV, AS, IPS, FW, CF and VPN) in one box.
• Easy to centrally manage and administer.
• Reduces multipoint points of failure as with point approach.
• Reduced security infrastructure cost and manpower to manage solutions.
• Reduce Network Latency as with point approach.
• Supports Green IT.

Some of the vendors carrying UTM solutions

Fortinet - http://www.fortinet.com/products/fortigate_overview.html
Checkpoint - http://www.checkpoint.com/products/utm/index.html
Juniper - http://www.juniper.net/products_and_services/firewall_slash_ipsec_vpn/index.html

Spam Spam Spam ................ go for the kill !!

We all will accept that spam is an extremely unpleasant thing. Every day finding our mailbox flooded with absolutely useless mails can be annoying. Apart from these Spam is one of the easiest way to get access to corporate data. For example a file attached to an e-mail message can be simply opened from the mail client program. And if the attached file is an executable program then it will be run automatically. The danger is that a file from an unknown sender can easily contain viruses, works or spywares(nowadays security threats come bundled practically in every type of file including office documents or mp3 audio files). That means a spam sent to 1000 untrained employees in a company is like 1000 loop holes to get inside corporate network. A success rate of even 0.001% for the spammer could lead to a huge loss to corporate confidential data and profit.

Some of the areas of concern with Spam Emails on the raise….

• Threat to Corporate data and Resources.
• Spam mails eating up employees precious time.
• Important business communication lost amongst a deluge of spam emails leading to business loss.
• Spam mails choking internet bandwidth leading to increased internet costs.
• Massive delays in sending and receiving emails.

Today best way to stay away from the security threats is to proactively block them before they reach the untrained corporate users / corporate network. Ideally one should consider to invest in anitspam solution which would be placed at the mail gateway.Todays antispam solution protects a corporate from spam and virus mails plus can do content filtering to a certain extent.Most of the antispam solution uses reputation services/ blacklist database to filter out spam mails. One should also be aware to choose an antispam solution with lesser false positive rates making sure that important business mails are not caught as spam.Links for some of the solutions which I feel could help you out on this are as below.......

http://www.postini.com

http://www.ironport.com

http://www.symantec.com/specprog/brightmail/index.html

About this Blog

This is an humble attempt to discuss about IT security needs and Solution for an Enterprise.Here you will find topics discussing about Firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, Anti-X protection, Content Protection and other security solutions used by enterprise.

Could be I might go out of topic sometimes.....but yes I am sure if u have reached this blog u have some thing to read on.... :)

Hope you will enjoy it....