How a UTM Simplifies Security Management

There has always been a debate between Unified Threat Management vs the best-of-breed approach. Traditionally, organisations use a point solution to protect themselves against each type of threat. Such standalone, or “best-of-breed”, security strategy often consumes huge amounts of money, resource and management time. Disparate security devices and operating systems come with multiple maintenance and support contracts, multiple upgrade and replacement schedules, multiple licensing obligations, multiple training programs and management resources. All of these add to the cost and complexity of an organisation's security infrastructure, and can have serious negative impact on up-time, availability and performance.

Since firms are now realizing the disadvantages, they are migrating to consolidated security platforms or UTM devices to reduce network complexity and switch Capex to Opex.

How a UTM Scores Over Traditional Security Solutions

UTM technology has several advantages including ease of deployment, use and management; flexibility (the ability to turn on whatever security functionality you need whenever you need it); and high ROI (a single UTM appliance is typically way more cost-effective than several standalone solutions). The fact that the various security functionalities within a UTM appliance is produced by one vendor typically also means better integration and coverage between these technologies. SMEs have been more keen to adopt UTM solutions than large enterprises but the situation has changed significantly in the last few years. With better education and awareness of integrated threat technologies, enterprises now realize that UTMs are not rudimentary or “short-cut” solutions targeting small organizations with few IT resources. More of them now understand that today's advanced UTMs perform better than single-point solutions, and can cover the gaps left unattended by traditional standalone solutions.

While some SMEs in India are still content to just have software protecting their organisations, they need to realise that these do not offer the performance of UTMs and are not able to cover the full spectrum of threats that UTMs can tackle.

The Case for UTMs in SMEs

For SMEs, there are no factors discouraging them from embracing UTMs per se once the benefits are properly explained to them. Some smaller enterprises, however, have significant constraints on technology budgets - some of them still think of IT as an expense rather than an investment. Thankfully, this psyche of small organizations is changing and those adopting IT solutions are embracing solutions that provide cost benefits to them, and UTMs are definitely such devices in the security category. The commoditization of network security is also helping SMEs in this regard. Rather than investing heavily on network security solutions, smaller firms can now have a subscription based model to implement network security on their premises through a managed service provider.

This has allowed organizations to have their IT spend on an Opex rather than Capex model. Going forward, we expect such managed services to become more readily available, thus giving more SMBs the ability to access the same levels of security traditionally enjoyed by large enterprises.

Traditionally, organisations use a point solution to protect themselves against each type of threat. Such standalone, or “best-of-breed”, security strategy often consumes huge amounts of money, resource and management time. Disparate security devices and operating systems come with multiple maintenance and support contracts, multiple upgrade and replacement schedules, multiple licensing obligations, multiple training programs and management resources. All of these add to the cost and complexity of anorganisation's security infrastructure, and can have serious negative impact on up-time, availability andperformance. Since firms are now realizing the disadvantages, they are migrating to consolidated security platforms or UTM devices to reduce network complexity and switch Capex to Opex.