UTM – A Pragmatic Security Solution for SMBs

– Sunil Sharma, VP Sales & Operations, India & SAARC, Cyberoam

Last year ICP (International Comparison Program - World Bank is one of its participants) released a ranking of nations based on the purchasing power parity (PPP). In this report, India was ranked third behind the US and China. It was also stated that Indian and Chinese economies have more than doubled relative to that of the US, since it last reported such figures in 2005.

Although, the rapid growth of Indian and Chinese economies has been a constant commodity for leading business publications, more things have gone in favour of India than any other nation in last one year. India is growing faster than China and in fact faster than any other major economy in the world. With initiatives like Make in India and Digital India, there is lot of interest in India as an investment destination. Though, it’s the services sector which drives India’s growth story, Foxconn’s entry is a big story for those who see India as the next electronic manufacturing hub after Taiwan and China.

However, there is another significant aspect of this growth – India’s booming SMB sector. With 51 million SMBs (next only to China), India is one of the fastest growing SMB nations, globally. A recent study by Zinnov on ‘Digital SMBs’ says that while only 40% of SMBs in India are tech-savvy, the number is expected to increase to 90% of all SMBs by 2020. Incidentally, SMBs in India are not able to adopt IT as the solutions are often provisioned to large enterprises’ requirements. These IT solutions are very generic and lack vertical centricity and also have a high learning curve. Unfortunately, this is true for IT security as well.

“UTMs act as a comprehensive security solution that bring several advanced capabilities like WAF (Web Application Firewall), Logging and Reporting and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) in addition to the Firewall, on a single appliance, removing the need for SMBs to invest heavily in any other standalone devices.”

Nonetheless, security is one area where organizations cannot afford any compromise. Presently, India experiences a huge number of data breaches (one of the highest number of average data breaches), and is a popular target for cyber criminals. Increasing adoption of technologies like wireless LAN, Wi-Fi hotspots, 3G wireless etc. have created a demand for products that provide holistic network security. The Government of India is also renewing its focus on improving the security and privacy regulations for the country as a whole and also at the industry level. According to a KPMG report, the market for information security in India will grow by 50% in the next three years. This is expected to trigger demand for advanced security systems like UTMs (Unified Threat Management Solutions).

Why UTMs cut the clutter for SMBs?

Next generation UTMs are designed specifically keeping in mind the changing requirements of SMBs. UTMs act as a comprehensive security solution that bring several advanced capabilities like WAF (Web Application Firewall), Logging and Reporting and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) in addition to the Firewall, on a single appliance, removing the need for SMBs to invest heavily in any other standalone security solution for such purposes. These appliances are generally easy to deploy and manage with built in security policy templates which substantially decreases the need for a highly-specialized technical staff for maintaining the organization’s networks.

Moreover, UTMs which globally have a well-entrenched presence in small organization networks, are now seeing an increasing adoption in enterprise networks as well. Enterprises see a great deal of sense in switching to these appliances as UTMs are keeping step with complex network security challenges, and offer higher throughputs as well. After all, it’s hard to resist the unique value proposition UTMs offer by consolidating the functionalities VPN boxes, legacy firewalls (traditional perimeter security), and IPS used to offer on standalone basis in the past.

UTMs today form the core of security for modern businesses and can help young SMBs in India to adopt the latest in technology, while ensuring that they maintain the requisite balance in their security, connectivity and productivity needs.