Yahoo. LinkedIn. Oracle. Wendy’s. Verizon. Snapchat. The IRS. These are just a few of the organizations that have announced major data breaches in 2016. Because hacks of large brands and government agencies are the only ones that grab headlines, there’s a tendency to overlook the fact that cybercriminals are increasingly targeting small and midsize companies. These businesses, with limited IT resources and expertise, offer the path of least resistance and often provide a backdoor into larger, more lucrative targets.
To assume “it will never happen to me” is a dangerous gamble when it comes to IT security. All organizations should operate as if they are under constant attack and defend themselves accordingly. However, many smaller companies tend to take a piecemeal approach to security, which adds complexity each time a new tool is added. This makes security infrastructure difficult to manage and scale and creates gaps that can be exploited before you know they exist.
Unified threat management (UTM) enables organizations to monitor and manage various security components through a single interface. UTM is capable of consolidating features such as email security, identity-based access controls, advanced threat protection, content filtering, data loss prevention and antivirus software in a single solution. This makes it easier to implement and maintain a comprehensive security strategy without managing disparate tools. Some UTM solutions enable organizations to deploy only the security technologies they need right away and add functionality as needed.
The simplicity of UTM is driving fast adoption of the technology — the UTM market has doubled in size during the past five years, according to a recent report from the IDC. Revenues have also grown at an annual rate of 13.4 percent. In fact, UTM is the only sub-market in the security appliance category that has seen double-digit growth for seven consecutive years.
UTM solutions are related to next-generation firewalls (NGFWs), which were developed to provide more advanced network protection for large enterprises. NGFWs include functionality not available in traditional firewalls, such as intrusion prevention and deep packet inspection, with an emphasis on performance. UTM solutions were designed primarily for smaller organizations, with an emphasis on streamlined installation and management.
That said, UTM performance should not be overlooked. UTM devices are constantly inspecting data packets, decrypting and encrypting traffic, performing behavioral analysis, scanning for malware, and filtering URLs. All of the processing performed by a UTM can affect network performance. At the same time, performance demands continue to increase exponentially as video, data analytics and other bandwidth-intensive applications push the limits of corporate networks. Increased usage of these applications only adds to the UTM workload.
Concerns about performance degradation are so prevalent that nearly one-third of IT professionals turn off security features to ensure network performance, according to a survey from a major security software provider. The features deactivated most frequently were deep packet inspection, antispam, antivirus and VPN access.
Organizations using UTM shouldn’t have to choose between security and performance. In the next post, we’ll discuss what to look for in a UTM solution to overcome the performance problem, and introduce you to a new UTM platform from WatchGuard.
