UTM isn't enterprise ready, or is it?

BANGALORE, INDIA: Unified threat management (UTM) are network firewalls that have many features in one box, including e-mail, spam filtering, anti-virus capability, an intrusion detection (or prevention) system (IDS or IPS), and world wide web content filtering, along with the traditional activities of a firewall.

For a long time, enterprises have been apprehensive of adopting UTM. It was thought to be for SMBs and the former were not ready to risk its network by pooling all its security features into single basket. However, today this scenario is undergoing a major change.

Vishak Raman, regional director, India & SAARC, Fortinet, talks at length with CIOL in this context. Excerpts:

CIOL: What makes enterprises believe, 'UTM is not enterprise ready'? To what extent has this scenario undergone a change today?

Vishak Raman: Enterprise UTM is an area that has seen significant technological advancements. However, because of the consolidated concept that security originally grew out of the SMB space, many enterprises were under the false impression that UTM is not enterprise ready, and that large companies require best-of-breed standalone devices for strong protection.

Enterprises are today more prone to blended threats than individual ones. Moreover, they are increasingly adopting the consolidated security concept offered by UTM solutions. Fortinet pioneered the concept more than nine years ago. Today, a full two-thirds of our business is made up of carriers and enterprise customers. So, the concept that customers do not think UTM is ready for enterprise environments is slowly going by the wayside. 

In fact, enterprise customers are increasingly embracing consolidated security for the high ROI and value that it offers, especially in the current economic environment.

CIOL: UTM is like pooling all eggs in one basket and risking network security. Is there much truth in this statement?

VR: UTMs are application layer firewalls that use proxies to process and forward all incoming traffic, though they can still frequently work in a transparent mode that disguises this fact. However, if this uses too much processor time, the higher-level inspection can be disabled so that the firewall functions like a much simpler network address translation (NAT) gateway.

Consolidated security solutions are today highly sophisticated, especially those that are engineered to be tightly integrated from the ground up. These products can actually offer better security than point products. For whatever reason, enterprises that do not want to consolidate all of their security functionality into a single device could gain measurable benefits even by consolidating two or three functions within a UTM and then supplement other security functionality with additional security point products.

CIOL: Has the credit crunch negatively impact UTM's penetration into enterprise segment? How cost effective is UTM?

VR: The current credit crunch has, in fact, strengthened UTM’s overall penetration into the enterprise space, as IT organizations are forced to relook at creative ways for securing their networks and doing more with less.

IT managers are increasingly choosing UTM over expensive, patchy point solutions. This creates tremendous opportunity for enterprise UTM’s value proposition to surface, as efficiency becomes the new technology must-have. Thus, underlining the strong cost-performance advantage UTM brings to enterprises and carriers alike.

Fortinet’s Enterprise UTM solution

Fortinet’s FortiGate appliance: This can offer companies better protection than they have with point solutions and with significant savings in capital and operational savings. Even if some enterprises are hesitant to put all of their security eggs in one basket, so to speak, consolidating just two or three functions can gain measurable benefits in both capital and operational savings.

The benefit of Fortinet’s FortiGate device, if not all functionality is initially utilized, is that organizations can later add more functionality by just turning on the features rather than having to purchase new solutions.

And when enterprises are ready to add additional functionality, all they need to do is turn on that function with FortiGate devices rather than having to purchase another point solution. Fortinet has seen tremendous success among large enterprises who have adopted FortiGate.

So much so that the company has begun to integrate even more security and network services in its most recent firmware update, the FortiOS 4.0 operating system. As announced earlier this month, Fortinet has added four new features including WAN optimization, data leakage protection, application control and SSL traffic inspection to the eight security functionalities already supported on its FortiGate appliance.