Unified Security for a changing world

BANGALORE: The evolution and complexity of threats needs to be addressed with proactive IT security strategies that maintain business continuity, provide infrastructure wide threat visibility and protection, and simplify day-to-day network management.

The entire security infrastructure—network, systems, and management—must work in cohesion to proactively defend against a wide array of threats, and reduce the mean time to respond and mitigate during an attack.

As networks are growing in complexity and as each industry vertical looks for vertical specific solutions, enterprises are looking at solutions that will allow them to integrate security in every aspect of their network to create an end-to-end integrated security system.

A systematic and planned approach to security enables tighter integration with the network, which delivers better overall security. Point-product strategies rely on connecting disparate products that address individual aspects of security whereas an integrated, collaborative, adaptive approach uses the network to provide ease of manageability and performance benefits.

Therefore security solutions with proactive blocking capabilities are seeing traction both in India and globally. Threat Management solutions deliver comprehensive and proactive network defense, streamlined policy and system management, and business continuity.

Enterprises need to look at Unified Threat Management solutions, which offer features/capabilities, based on the business needs and the environment. One needs to ensure that the performance is not compromised as and when multiple features are enabled on the UTM appliance.

Rather it is imperative to focus on how well the UTM Appliance integrates into the overall Security Architecture of the organization as well as how well it collaborates with the other Security and Infra-structure devices.

Collaboration becomes crucial as the network is embedded with intelligent applications.

Organizations need not procure, install, and manage multiple point products such as anti-spam, anti-spyware, anti-phishing, and URL filtering. Based on the security strategy for security features and performance needs in the solution, enterprises tend to decide if they need to turn on additional functionality in the same environment or replace some with new solution.

Let’s take a look at some of the key business questions that UTM solutions can address:

· Are you concerned with spyware, spam, or viruses infecting your network and affecting your business?

· Do you have employees who are surfing Websites that may subject the company to legal liability?

· Do your employees spend a lot of time during business hours looking at non-business-related Websites? How does this affect your employee productivity?

· Are you concerned about theft of confidential information through phishing?

· Do you want to ensure that your employees’ network bandwidth and storage are not flooded with unwanted spam?

· Do you need to extend your network to support remote office access and guest users?

· Do you need to consolidate multiple point security products to realize operational efficiencies and maximize IT resources?

I am sure these questions are real time challenge for every organization but in recent days these questions are much more relevant with financial institutions where they have not so IT savvy users and are struggling with strict security compliance and regulatory requirements. UTM helps in answering to these questions with unified management, resulting in clear operational and financial savings.

Unified Threat Management (UTM) is being adopted by most enterprises today. Security vendors including Cisco have realized that users want a single box solution that can take care of all their security requirements, and hence the growth of UTM has been quite encouraging.

According to IDC, the UTM segment is the fastest-growing segment in the security appliance market globally. IDC believes that by 2008, UTM security systems will comprise a majority of the $3.45 billion combined firewall/VPN and UTM market—outpacing traditional standalone firewall/ VPNs with a 58 percent share.

Transforming chaos into clear and manageable security policy is essential, which is why future network security systems need to focus on convergence and consolidation.

In network security, a proactive approach is critical. The idea is to accurately identify and stop attacks as early and as far from the destination host as possible, while simultaneously simplifying the security architectures required to do this.

(The author is a business development manager at Cisco India & SAARC)