Guarding the UTM space

Unified threat management or UTM, is hot currency these days. The term is quite in circulation, if the players are to be believed. But there seems to be a lot of ambiguity around the term and who is the winner or the loser. There are several claimants to the top post, like Fortinet, Elite Core, Sonic Wall, and others. And newer ones are emerging to grab a piece of the security pie.

WatchGuard is relatively a new kid on the UTM block. Shashwat Chaturvedi from Cyber Media News spoke to Ajit Pillai, country manager, WatchGuard on the different trends in the appliance security space. Excerpts.

There is lot of ambiguity surrounding the term UTM, what exactly is UTM?

UTM refers to all-in-one devices that consolidate multiple security systems into one appliance for complete attack protection against the entire threat matrix. The development of UTM is a major firewall inflection trend based on the need for stronger perimeter security solutions because attacks have become much more sophisticated. Application-level defenses, and the ability to prevent known and unknown attacks for a unified threat management approach, become more critical daily.

Most of the security vendors today offer segregated solutions, where different vendors offer specific security solutions. An integrated solution, which eliminates all these bottlenecks is the need of the hour. Security threats have been through virus, hacker attacks and IP spoofing. Today, these are more blended. The hacker uses a virus to enter an enterprise network, Spam is one of the biggest irritants being extensively used. It besides chocking your network is also being extensively employed to extract corporate information. UTM has features like Web Blocking and URL Filtering.

How is the UTM market evolving in India?

Though India is still a nascent market as far as security beyond antivirus goes. But with increased technical and educated crowd and not to mention, the increasing Internet population, it is experiencing tremendous growth in the UTM market. The awareness has increased thus creating a huge potential and an accelerated growth.

Also, the booming IT and ITES market, the investors showing keen interest in Indian business, has paved way for the security business to experience an upward trend.

How is the appliance- based security performing vis-à-vis software based solutions?

Appliance-based solutions have many advantages over software-based solutions, like, lower total cost of ownership, better security, faster and easier installation, less maintenance overhead, and better and faster support. Deploying a software-based security application is a painful process ripe with opportunities for error. To reduce the opportunities for error, many companies are choosing to go with appliance-based solutions as they have many advantages over software-based solutions. Appliances are dedicated, sometimes specialized, hardware devices that are designed to perform a single task.

What are the different kinds of protection offered by your UTM Boxes?

UTM contributes in a major way to WatchGuard revenues globally. Approximately 60 per cent of our revenue comes from these services. To counteract all this threats we have the unified threat management system, where appliances are available under the Firebox brand.

How has WatchGuard performed in India?

We have been in this market for close to five years. WatchGuard started its operations in India from Chennai but soon shifted its India headquarters to Mumbai. From here, we mainly look after the SAARC countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

We also have our global call center, R systems located in India for the last 5 years out of Gurgoan. Our development centers are located in the U.S. as of now. We also have a joint venture with Citrix for our SSL range of products.

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