March 12, 2006

Should You Consider Unified Threat Management

Over the past several weeks several vendors have brought to my attention the latest in security protection for businesses - unified threat management (UTM). While individual appliances for firewalls, anti-virus, virtual private networks, anti-phishing and more are important, a better solution might be integrating an array of protection into one device.

WatchGuard, Cymphonix, Zyxel and many others all have solutions in this space.

Instead of having several different software or hardware appliances to secure your network a unified threat management appliance could cost less, be easier to manage and possibly be more secure.

SecurityPipeline.com has a review of several UTM appliances.

There's a lot of choices to consider so work with your local solution provider for help.

Watchguard writes Unified Threat Management (UTM) is the name for an emerging trend in the appliance security market. Unified Threat Management appliances have evolved traditional firewall and VPN appliances into a product that has many additional capabilities, such as URL filtering, spam blocking, spyware protection, intrusion prevention, gateway antivirus and a centralized management, monitoring, and logging capability - all functions previously handled by multiple systems.

Zyxel has a new product line of UTM devices which includes 8 integrated modules which provide an optimum security appliance for internet computing. These capabilities include:

1. Firewall: defends the network against all kinds of intrusion attempts to keep the office environment free of infections or system exploits.

2. Virtual Private Network (VPN): constructs on-demand ¬?data tunnels¬? among internet-connected but geographically separated computers.

3. Load Balance: utilizes multiple Wide Area Networks (WANs) to relieve the load on certain network areas. With the agile load balancing capability, users will see no performance impact when even part of the network is extremely busy.

4. Bandwidth Management: includes better analysis, categorization, prioritization and manual overriding control that will significantly boost the application performance while keeping the network traffic efficient.

5. Anti-Virus: protects computers online from virus infection. Virus protection service is provided by Kaspersky Labs, a security software developer and worldwide leader known for its fast response to new virus threats.

6. Intrusion Detection & Protection (IDP) protect against malicious attacks by constantly monitoring networking applications.

7. Spam Blocking: powered by MailShell, the number one provider of spam-filtering and anti-phishing software, spam blocking reduces unwanted email and relieves the load of mail servers and networks to save time and personal computing power.

8. Content Filtering: eliminates unproductive Web browsing in the office. Keywords and rules can be defined to keep the network healthy while reducing the bandwidth burden by slashing the unnecessary loads. Content filtering is provided by Blue Coat (previously Cerberian).

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