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UTMs Vs Traditional Security: What's Better?

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PCQ Bureau
New Update


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Unified Threat Management as the name suggests is for those who want a one stop solution for ease of management. This gateway level security solution comprises of features like anti-spam, anti-virus, intrusion detection/prevention, firewall, bandwidth management, VPN, centralised management and reporting. With multiple vendors offering UTM solutions in addition to open source options, there is increasing affinity among vendors to provide product differentiation by adding new features to their product line. Below we have listed down some must-have features keeping the future of IT security in mind:

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Fast processing speed



Most of the UTM vendors sell their product as appliance, a combination of optimized software and hardware. Now with too much pressure on these gateway devices as they have to inspect every packet that goes through them, UTM appliance itself can become performance bottleneck. To enhance performance of appliance vendors are going for multi core processors and utilizing this multicore capability by developing multi threaded UTM operating system.        



Gigabit throughput

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Though we are still far away from time when we would use Gigabit Internet, it would be better to invest in infrastructure that is capable to handling such speeds as these purchases are not made every year.      



User level authentication



Though IP and MAC based filtering in firewall is still common with concepts like BYOD along with addition of new computing devices (smart phones and tablets) into organizational environment providing fool proof security based on IP and MAC is becoming difficult and at times impossible. Here is a brief story of what our IT team highlighted while testing pilot NComputing deployment. As single machine with single IP is shared by multiple users in NComputing IP based firewall became irrelevant. To overcome these very practical issues it is recommended to go for UTM device capable of authenticating user than IP/MAC.      

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Application Firewall



Application firewalls are capable of blocking particular application and leaving others, this is yet another must have feature in your UTM. Now there are number of P2P applications that are bugging network admins for years, with application firewall blocking them is quite simple, on similar lines other applications with high perceived risk can be better managed with this feature.       



Support for both IPSec and SSL VPN

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Secure connection to remote location is must these days as increasing number of people prefer working from home to better manage their private life without hampering their professional one. VPN has been technology of choice to enable this very setup, therefore next time when you go for UTM make sure that it supports both client based IPSec and non client based SSL VPN. With increasing popularity of SSL VPN having this feature is must for future usability.  



Support for 3G/4G and WAN failover



To give additional Internet failover functionality besides the existing inbuilt WAN failover mechanism, UTM these days also support wireless Internet technologies like 3G/4G etc. Having this additional failover mechanism in place means almost zero downtime even if wired network is down, just plug in 3G capable dongle into your UTM and have additional piece of mind.

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