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